True Blue
by purplegirl761
Summary: The teenage crime fighter overwhelmed by the start of high school. The mad scientist out for revenge. The AI programmed to make it happen. Think you've seen this story? Think again. Minor T/borderline K plus.
1. Jailbreak

**~I've been salivating over this project for almost a year now. ****The 2019 live-action movie: rewritten. The movie wasn't bad at all on its own merits, but I felt that in many cases it fell short of capturing the tone of the show itself - most notably in its portrayals of Drakken and Shego. In this story, we'll watch the same events unfold in a different (and admittedly, sometimes more cartoony) way. Drakken is blue, Shego is sharp-tongued, and Athena. . . hoo-doggy, do I have plans for that girl.  
**

**Anyway, I hope you'll give it a shot, whether you were also disappointed by the movie or not. I'm not trying to write a version that's objectively "better" - just one that's more faithful to the rules of our favorite show. :)~**

**1\. Jailbreak**

People could speculate endlessly on her cruddy childhood and her family issues - and, who knew, maybe they had a point. But the main reason Shego had gone into the villain biz was for the glamor.

And now here she was, reading a list of demands scrawled on toilet paper.

Dr. Drakken wouldn't know "glamor" if he wiped his nose on it.

Shego had already followed most of the instructions that were still legible through the seeping ink - blue to match the skin Drakken still didn't seem quite comfortable inside. Stolen the helicopter with its cloaking-device doodad from HenchCo. Rounded up the henchmen. Located an underground hideout in a neighborhood the police mostly ignored. Fired up the robot incubator - and Drakken had assured Shego he'd take it from there with his "superoir brillaince."

Right. That same "superoir brillaince" that couldn't learn to spell.

She'd grant Drakken this: he was much more entertaining than any other employer she'd had so far.

He was also possibly the most obnoxious person on the planet who _didn't _share a family tree with her. But, hey, there was nothing good on TV, so she might as well break him out. He'd already offered to pay her more than Shego knew his red-smudged checkbook could afford to dole out.

Drakken had also done his pathetic best to direct her to the "remote Arctic prison" where he was being held in "solidarity" - his own words, natch. He even semi-apologized for not being able to provide her with landmarks. Uh, yeah. Because there _weren't _any, unless you counted various sizes of snow-covered bumps. It ended with, _If you reach Santa's workshop, you've gone too far_.

Which Shego sincerely hoped was Dr. D's idea of a joke.

Iffy and straight-from-second-grade as Drakken's directions had been, though, it was hard to miss the enormous chain-link fence, strung with barbed wire at its head and feet, trying to look like it had sprung up naturally on the tundra. Shego snorted under her breath as she steered the helicopter over it and set it down on the outskirts of what would've been the prison yard if not for the inhumane wind chill.

The helicopter perched delicately on a fresh patch of snow, as if it too couldn't WAIT to have this over with. Shego flung herself from the front seat and hit the ground in a crouch. After a moment of nothingness, she strolled over to the building, her walk casual but her senses jacked up to fire-at-the-first-footstep-in-the-snow readiness.

No alarms, though. No sirens. No flashing lights. It was almost disappointing. She hadn't had a decent fight in weeks.

Ventilation shafts were always the first things she looked for. Yeah, it was the easy way out, but Shego saved the over-complicating for Drakken and other villains of his caliber. Just might explain why _he _was the one in prison, and _she _was the one busting him out.

Shego squatted beside the vents, screwed onto the building at about calf level. Through their mini-slits, she stared down at a lipstick tube of a shaft, _maybe _wide enough for her to swing a limb or two in. It couldn't have been any less helpful if it had been a prairie dog tunnel. Shego could almost picture the architects grinning at their own cleverness as they crunched the sides in as close together as they could get. The slits themselves seemed to leer back at her.

_All right, so say goodbye to the crawl-in-through-the-vents plan. _Hardly a bummer. Unlike Drakken, who marked every entrance he made with everything short of a brass band, Shego _could _appreciate the subtle approach. Sometimes, though, it was nice to burst through a wall and watch the faces gape at her in horror - the more macho, the better - realizing they should be afraid of a woman who still had two more online semesters to go before she got her degree.

Shego clawed the grate off the vent anyway. It was just _begging _to be used as a diversion.

Sure enough, _that _caught their lame security system's attention. There was a brief pause, and then the building shook with a five-year-old-who-skinned-his-knee wail. Two years ago, Shego would have shaken off the shrill clang of it. This time, she took a moment to absorb it and let it fill her with pressure, all of which she charged down to the legs that had carried her around the other side of the building probably before the guards had even set down their coffee cups.

No exaggeration there. And no bragging about her speed, either. The place was surprisingly dinky and squat and looked like it had been designed by whatever moron had slapped together Go City Elementary's jungle gym. At least that moron had the sense not to wrap a rickety slide around _this _building. Odds were, even Drakken would figure out how to take advantage of that.

Eventually.

Shego curled her fingers inside her gloves, arching the blades at their ends. Adrenaline buzzed in her ears and hot-wired her veins. There were people who'd take drugs to get that kind of high.

A whiplash-look over both shoulders revealed nobody coming her way yet. Shego cruised through the snow until she located what appeared to be the front door, where a laminated sign pleaded with her to "KEEP OUT - RESTRICTED AREA."

Mmm-hmm. Cute. That hadn't stopped her since she was _five_.

Shego slipped a fingertip under the doorknob and turned the plasma on to a simmer to soften the thing. The Arctic winds pushed against her back, trying uselessly to intimidate their way into her thermal-insulated jumpsuit. Fifteen seconds and a swipe later, and the knob dropped into a snowbank, leaving behind a hand-shaped hole surrounded by steaming metal. Shego reached through, found the place where the door met its frame, and plucked it out like a stray eyebrow hair.

Instantly, a guard was there, handcuffs and other prison goodies jangling from his belt. "Hey! You can't go in there!" he hollered.

Zero points for creativity. He might as well have been cooked up in Drakken's lab himself and loaded with a few prerecorded phrases.

Shego cocked her head to the side and pulled on a mask of confusion. "Actually, yeah, I can," she said. "Want to watch?"

The plasma hurled itself to the ends of her fingers, inseparable from the anger racing to keep up with it. Shego gathered every emotion she had cut off before it could reach under her skin in the past year - which, admittedly, wasn't a lot - and threw it all into the punch she landed between the loser's eyes. He fell to the ground like a sandbag.

Shego shook back the couple strands of hair that had fallen out of place and cranked a phony-sweet look down at the guard. "I guess not," she said, and she slid another fingernail under the doorknob behind him.

Three more layers of doors, each with a single guard offered up as bait. When the fourth door was tossed aside, however, a whopping four men - huge, armed, and all that jazz - stared back at her. Heads jerked around on necks that froze. That buzz in Shego's veins? Yeah, it was enough to beat back the cold on its own.

The first man shot to his feet and got to stay vertical for a beat or two before Shego's fist cracked against his jaw. Its chiseled-out cockiness flinched back into itself, and he slid to the floor in a daze, mumbling something about wanting a raise.

A second man jumped up and had the cluelessness to run toward Shego with an arm outstretched - an arm she gratefully latched on to, twisted behind his back and used to swing him into the third man, who had been trying to sneak up on her from around behind. Emphasis on "trying." The collision propelled one of them backward through the wrecked door and left the other in a heap beside his friend.

Now they were down to one man, whose chest was level with Shego's face. He eyeballed her with an _I-know-you-femme-fatale-types _expression. The way his hands shook as he crossed them protectively over that chest - as if Shego was _really _gonna puncture his uniform with a poke and then saw it all the way open, as if she _enjoyed _stripping enemies down to their boxers - confessed that he'd really only ever seen them in B-movies.

As bile-inducing as the thought was, Shego decided to play to his fears. She poised a nail in front of the man's jacket zipper. He forfeited his grip on his walkie-talkie to grab the zipper, and Shego took that moment to snatch him by the collar and slam his helmeted head into the wall. She tossed his squid-limp body to the ground and wasn't too sophisticated to avoid stepping on it on her way into the threshold.

Her own body was still humming with that battle-electricity that would inevitably peter out the further away she got from the scene. That had been about as hard as taking on a couple of those little green plastic soldiers that Drakken still kept a bucket of under his bed. It was a pump, but it didn't last long enough to satisfy her. Man, she almost missed that little middle-school girl who'd put Drakken in here in the first place - the braces-faced one with the Lara Croft complex.

This door took three tries to pull off its hinges. If Shego hadn't known she was reaching endgame before, she would've figured it out now. Turned out she was right - when she'd finally flung the door aside, she was standing in a wafer-flat room, stamped on all sides with doors the shape of playing cards, each with a padlock on it big enough to chain up an ATV.

_Annnnnnd checkmate._

Drakken had actually described this room to her in his TP-letter. His door would be the one "right in the center of things - right where I belong." Shego prepped her eye muscles to do some serious rolling and swung a green bolt at the lock, which gave a hollow bang and deflated against the door. The door itself crumbled away like aluminum within a minute of her plasma touching it.

_This _was what was supposed to keep the world's supervillain population contained? Were they _kidding_?

Or maybe it did work on your average supervillain.

Shego shook her head at the flames as the door dissolved into ash. She didn't want to sound like a snot, but it was hard NOT to smirk over the realization that if they had tried to slap _her _in here, she would've booked it to Switzerland and claimed asylum in _way _less than a year's time.

_So - better go in there prepared for anything. _From what she knew about Drakken, Shego had him pegged as about the last guy who'd be able to do hard time. The dude had a case of claustrophobia almost as bad as his permanent bed-head. And in solitary? Yeah, Shego wouldn't have blamed him if he'd chewed off an arm by now.

Especially not once her eyes acclimated to the cell-the-size-of-her-whole-apartment she was now crossing into. Blank and unfurnished, the floor waxed clean of shoe prints, it looked more like a warehouse up for sale to the highest bidder. A few windows cut through the walls at their highest corners, but a peek through them only revealed the twenty more layers of gray standing between them and the lifeless Arctic landscape. In the center of the room sat a diamond enclosure, glass clamped tight on all six sides in a way that screamed snake-in-a-cage.

Except a snake wouldn't have needed the steel reinforcements clamped to the base of every pane.

The Drakken Shego had last seen in the grasp of a policeman who remained utterly unfazed by either his screamed threats _or _his bucking-broncho attempts to wrench free - that Drakken couldn't have thrashed his way out of here if he'd been given a pair of brass knuckles and a baseball bat. Shego had known THAT about him from the first day she'd clocked in. Inside the dome, she could make out the very-basic necessities - toilet, sink, and cot.

A memory winked in Shego's mind, something where she'd been bored and had shown up super-early for work one day and was greeted by an astonished Drakken dressed in flannel PJ's and a well-used bathrobe. A mug of unnecessary coffee had steamed in front of him as he thumbed through the funny pages. He'd had the biggest, gooniest smile.

The plasma stayed hot and ready in Shego's fingers, but for the briefest moment, the vein-buzz went cold.

Shego heard Drakken before she saw him. He was mumbling under his breath - which, in Drakken's thunder-baritone, was still a surround-sound experience. "They just don't understand," he said. "She thinks she's all that - and she's not!"

Ah. He must still be bitter about Little Miss Chain-Link Teeth.

Shego took a step closer. Yep, it was Drakken all right. Not too many other prisoners whose skin blended right into the powder-blue thick stripes they were forced to wear. He sat huddled in the corner like a baby rabbit. Whatever bozo was in charge of this place must have snipped off Drakken's trademark cheesy ponytail when he'd first arrived. The scraggly strands of hair reached desperately for his shoulders and kicked up around his ears, like they wanted to curl and undo everything that voice of his achieved.

"The problem is - they think she's all that, too!" Drakken continued. "But she's not, right, Shego? We are, right, Shego?"

Uh. Okay. Pretty odd even for Dr. D to be talking to her without looking at her.

Even odder that he paused as if she had said so much as a darn word to him, and then followed it up with, "Oh, thank you, Shego. I knew you'd see it my way. . . eventually."

_Yup. Officially no more icing on THESE cupcakes._

Shego smacked the heel of her hand hard into the glass. "Over here, dipstick."

The baby rabbit whirled around and transformed into the Tasmanian Devil.

Drakken launched himself straight at the wall, bawling her name, fingers scrabbling at the glass as if they could scratch free to find hers. His forehead knocked against it and left a grease stain, the sign of a man who'd panicked himself into a sweat. Between that and the wild-twitching legs, Shego wouldn't have been surprised if he'd taken his tongue to the glass next. "Oh, Shego! It's really you! This is really happening!" he shouted.

_Yeah, and thanks for announcing it to the world._

Another gallon of sweat streamed down Drakken's forehead. The rest of his face didn't seem to have aged as much as it had just gotten bleaker. The bags beneath his eyes looked like someone had charbroiled them to match the scar that slashed down his left cheek.

Shego lifted a hand. "Move back, Drakken," she said into that face.

Drakken shot to the back wall, though judging from the backward, _this-is-torture _glance he turned on her, it took everything he had to do it. Shego took a half-second to picture Drakken scribbling his gratitude on a fat check and to fill her lungs with musty air before she sent her fist through the front of the diamond.

Glass shards sprayed inward, and Drakken yelped. Whether he'd actually gotten clipped by one or was just being a nervous wreck, Shego didn't know - and didn't especially care. Their explosion tore a few bits of steel loose from the base, which gave a weakened groan.

Perfect.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Drakken staring at her, his chin hanging on its rounded, hairless hinges that made him look about fifteen years younger than he should've.

Shego executed the handstand she'd spent almost a decade of gymnastics lessons memorizing. From there, she plunged her weight off her hands into a front flip. In midair, her legs came up to meet the top of the pane and shoved against it. It fell backward into the diamond and shattered, slinging fragments of glass into the other panels as if to take them down with it.

Drakken rushed forward across the ground he apparently didn't care was crunching under his feet. He skidded on the wax job within inches of her - Shego let him freak for a while, and then caught hold of his sleeve in his last second of balance. And then he did what was pretty much the last thing Shego would have imagined he would do.

He flung his arms around her and pushed his shuddering beanpole-frame up against her.

Shego froze. It had been years since somebody had hugged her, and it didn't take long to remember how much she absolutely _hated _it. Also not helping were the sounds coming out of Drakken, the sort that dogs made pre-upchuck. Shego was this close to doing a clothes-saving back-away when something wet plopped onto her collarbone.

Those heaves. Drakken wasn't retching. He was crying - actual, serious _tears_ that soaked her shoulder and warmed it. Between the sobs and the stale sweat, the smell of salt oozed so heavily from him that Shego had no choice but to breathe through her mouth.

"Shego!" Drakken gasped. "Oh, Shego, you came! You came for me! At last you came! Oh, thank goodness you came! I was so lonely!" Whatever else he had to say dissolved into mush.

_Mmmkay. The heck?_

She'd never seen a supervillain brought to tears before. Oh, sure, Aviarius had come close those couple times when she'd threatened some of his killer-birdie friends, and The Mathter always kept up a continuous whimper when he was being carted down to the station. But now here was Dr. Drakken, the man who she'd watched finger HenchCo's laser blasters with greedy eyes, clinging to her like a pair of skinny jeans and just spurting worse than a busted shower-head.

In some sinking part of herself, Shego began to suspect that maybe Santa's workshop _hadn't _been a joke.

All right, so maybe this WOULDN'T exactly be the crime of the century. _But - hey - whatever happens, I still get paid. _At this point, Drakken probably would have donated a kidney if she'd asked for one.

Not a bad feeling. At least not compared to how it currently felt to have Drakken smearing moisture-that-had-better-just-be-tears all over her.

Weird. If Dementor or Killigan or any of the other guys she'd done mercenary work for had EVER hugged her, Shego would've removed their hands - and, like, not from her body. From theirs. It would have been such a lame excuse to get their paws all over her. But this felt different somehow.

It didn't feel _good_, and it sure as heck wasn't welcome. But the arms that clutched her now weren't taut with a plan or silky with ulterior motives. He was all shudders and slobber and poke-out elbows he didn't know what to do with and a pathetically weak grip that barely made a dent in the fabric it found and eyes like a pair of Ding-Dongs. Crazily, the word _harmless _came to Shego's mind, and the toughness she'd prepared for this meeting locked inside her with nowhere to go. Sort of like blazing into a grizzly's cave with your bear spray ready and getting greeted by a cub who just wanted to bat at your jeans leg instead.

The anticlimactic _non_-event almost frustrated her.

Just when Shego was about to jerk away, Drakken pulled back first and straightened himself up. He slapped his tears flat and seemed to pull a layer of Cellophane - thin but almost impossible to remove - over his face. "Yes, well, nicely done, Shego," he said with a noisy snuffle that was probably supposed to ring with _I-am-so-over-this_. "It is now time to move on to Phase Two."

The transition wasn't smooth, but it was quick - Shego could give him that.

She _could_. But she wasn't gonna. Not when he'd left another option gaping open for her.

Shego stared up at the suddenly-cold man in front of her, the man whose warmth she could still feel soaking into her shoulder. "Um, yeah, Drakken. That just happened."

"Whatever do you mean?"

"I have your _snot _on my jumpsuit." Shego gestured to the stain that was _so_ getting scrubbed with disinfectant at the next available opportunity. "That totally happened."

Drakken cranked his eyes down into red-rimmed slits. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," he said, fingers fluttering toward the smoldering hole that _used _to be the doorway. "Back out the way we came?"

Shego shook her head. Nah. The guards had probably woken up while Drakken was having his little pity party.

"No way," Shego said. "_Up _and at 'em."

He wasn't the only one who could work in a bad pun every now and then.

A question mark all but popped out over Drakken's head, and he gestured to the ceiling with a hand Shego just realized was covered with a sock. Once bluish-green and now fading into disgusting, it sported a smudged-up face that had clearly been drawn with the same fat-tipped marker that had scribbled in black shock waves all across the top of the sock and down its back.

_That's supposed to be my hair, _Shego realized with a recoil. _It's supposed to be ME._

Well, crud. That was a _tiny _bit concerning.

_Too far to turn back now, though._

With a tug at the front of his striped jail duds, Shego hopped the two of them up onto the Drakken-cage's ceiling. She brought her plasma out to play and carved a circle at least twice as wide as Drakken's shoulder span into the ceiling.

Drakken stared at her, lips parted. For a second, Shego was sure she was breaking him out of Juvie instead of solitary confinement a thousand miles from anywhere.

That didn't really go away as she nudged him up through the hole - to the lovely soundtrack of his back cracking - and followed him. "Let's move," Shego said and gave Drakken a shove off the roof. Short drop into at least a foot of snow, but he still hollered like she had pushed him from the top floor of the Empire State Building. She'd have to get on his case for that later - but at this point she'd have been surprised if anyone could hear him over the chorus of sirens now shrieking from every place they could possibly shriek.

Shego landed beside him in the snowdrift that barely had time to fold under her before she sprang to her feet, snagged Drakken's wrist, and hauled _both _their tails across the tundra to the helicopter. Furious shouts got flung their way, but they were coming from the other side of the building, from still-groggy guards who wouldn't be able to reach them anytime soon. Shego could hear Drakken gasping beside her. _Her _breaths, on the other hand, though they felt like liquid steel sliding in and out of her lungs, didn't get any faster or shallower.

If anything, the faster her cheetah-sprint carried her, the more control she felt spread through her. Yeah, her veins raged, but only on _her _terms.

The slam of the helicopter door behind them was a relief, but Shego also heard that same click inside herself that her cell phone got when she plucked it off its charger. She didn't do power-down mode any better than Drakken apparently did stints in solitary. _He_'d folded onto the passenger seat and attempted to fasten his seat belt with hands that wouldn't stay still.

Shego got her own hands onto the controls and lifted the two of them off the ground. Below her, she could hear the guards griping at each other, trying to pass the blame down the line. It made her grin, and Drakken sighed so heavily Shego thought for a minute that he'd just gone ahead and swooned.

He hadn't, though. Next time she glanced over at him, his fingers had formed a nest for his mega-chin to rest in, propped up by his thumbs. Those fingers rubbed in movements that Shego was sure were meant to be shrewd. "Did you follow the instructions I sent you?" Drakken said.

"Uh, yeah. Boy did I ever." Shego waggled the T.P. roll at him. And then she threw out the words she had no reason _not _to say - "And it was just as annoying as working for you in real life."

Drakken shot her a death glare that worked about as well as _Bricks of Fury: The Musical._ Ground-up sounds pulled out of his mouth in spasms. Shego remembered that about him now - get him exasperated enough, and he would practically have to give him_self _CPR in order to stay in the conversation.

A good two or three minutes passed before Drakken was able to shake it off - bodily, in that wet-dog style of his. "Then it is time to get to work avenging my lair," he said, his voice lowering into its white-water-rapids-rumble.

Oh, so THAT's what this was about. He was feeling all homesick for that stupid private-island lair of his, the one she couldn't care less about. Between the charcoal-colored ceiling pillars that jutted aggressively toward the sky and the skull-and-crossbones warning signs punched just as hard into the sand, it had screamed _There is definitely a supervillain in here working on a plot to conquer the world! _a little too loud for Shego's taste.

She glanced out the window, where the whirling frost had already blotted the prison out of sight. "So we'll go back to our new hideout, and I can hear all about whatever dopey scheme you've rigged up now."

Drakken turned to look at her, questions wrinkled into the usually-way-too-smooth-for-a-dude-his-age forehead. "You know, you're not nearly as supportive as my sock puppet," he said, holding up the sock his right hand was still buried in.

"Yeah, but I'm so much less of a _sock_. And she didn't break you out of prison, Drakken. _I _did." She put an edge on that last syllable and poked him with it. Because she just wasn't ready to tune into the all-Drakken-all-the-time channel yet.

Drakken lapsed into a pout. Shego was suddenly grateful that they'd had him caged up by himself. Sure, he'd gotten "lonely" - but that was nothing compared to how the other prisoners would've been on him like a flock of falcons as soon as they'd gotten a whiff of him. Even in Juvie, she realized with a grunt, he'd have barely survived.

"Not everything can be solved with brute force, Shego," Drakken said, huffing air as if _she _were the one being ridiculous.

Shego probably could've held back the guffaw, but it was so much more fun to let it tumble out. "Why were you even in prison if you believe that?"

Drakken's next glance her direction was hasty and fighting to back itself up. "Most things," he told her. "But not every _single _thing."

"Thanks for the clarification, Doc."

There was no way Drakken caught her sarcasm. He'd already turned back to what little horizon there was out here, his gaze vacant, halfway to Pluto by now. "Yes, Shego. We shall steal from Kim Possible that which allowed her to defeat me, and we shall make sure the entire world knows that she is nothing more than a pubescent female poking her nose into the affairs of grown-ups!"

_He _so _did not just say "pubescent."_

Aside from that, even Shego couldn't craft many zingers around THAT speech. It wasn't that his words were so impressive - it was the rapids rushing up to a speed where they actually sounded hazardous to Miss Goody-Two-Shoes' health. Not to mention the sneer he sent her way that he must have spent his entire lockup practicing, 'cause it was way closer to intimidating that it had been a year ago. For a flat-out sprint of a moment, he wasn't the geeky ding-dong with the eyes to match anymore. He was someone whose brain Shego could just about see darkening with the promise of revenge.

Maybe this wouldn't be the most annoying gig of all time after all.


	2. Lair

**~Onward we plunge. :D Thanks to all my readers and reviewers!~**

2\. Lair

Fresh air was _vastly _underrated.

That was what Dr. Drakken decided as he gripped the sides of the helicopter's door with fingers that he just now realized were shaking - come to think of it, _everything _on him was shaking, including his breathing. What was that about? Shego looked up at him quizzically from the forest floor where they'd just landed, and Drakken knew there was no time to stop and ponder that. He swung himself out the doorway and his feet met the ground with a satisfying smack.

And immediately, his ankles crumpled beneath him. To keep from falling flat on his belly, Drakken had to reach behind him, catch onto the helicopter and hang his weight against it like an astronaut returning from a decade-long voyage into space and now trying to readjust to gravity. Ooh, how he _hated _to show such weakness in front of Shego, but surely even she would understand if _she _had just spent a near-eternity crammed into dimensions almost too small to pace in, among surfaces almost too hard to sit on.

When she'd blasted into the prison and left a steaming trail of destruction behind her, Drakken had been rattled by the same feeling he used to get as a child when Mother arrived to pick him up before the bigger boys could start their after-school torment of him. Only a thousand times bigger, more powerful, an earthquake compared to the seismic quiver of seeing Mother's car pull into the school parking lot.

He didn't even know her that well - Shego, that is - but she was the one spot of color he'd seen in that same near-eternity. Everything in and around the Arctic pen had been blue-white, including Drakken's own hands when he caught worrisome glimpses of them. She was also the first human being to walk in _without _wearing handcuffs and a flashlight on her belt and an expression on her face that blamed him for everything from Watergate onward yet simultaneously dismissed him as no great threat. How Drakken loathed the only guard who showed up at seemingly-random intervals. Had daydreamed multiple times that a polar bear would eat him for supper.

But that didn't matter. Shego was here now. Something about her pointy-angled presence was a reassurance to Drakken, a guarantee that all would be right in time. Drakken didn't doubt for a second that he'd have melted into sheer panic if anyone else had been with him on that helicopter, once again behind the glass that he was very, very fed up with.

All anger fizzled out in Drakken's brain as he lifted an arm to soak in the air that felt like a cool handshake and smelled like fallen leaves and tasted like bonfires. It was fall; it had to be. The prison at the top of the world had existed in a permanent winter, and of course the guard hadn't let Drakken celebrate anything - Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July. Just one more reason why he should have been polar bear chow.

"What month is it?" Drakken asked. The ground suddenly felt slippery underneath him, like it might squirt off without him the way the time had.

"September," Shego said. She jerked her abundant mane of silken hair at him. "Now, if you've gotten your land legs back, I'd kinda like to get you to our lair before we've attracted _too _much attention."

Lair!

Drakken knew everything on him was perking in joy, right up to the hair that should have been longer. He still remembered the slash-mouthed way the warden had looked at him as he'd sheared Drakken's ponytail with one decisive snip of his scissors, as if he'd just clipped a bird's wings. The analogy began to break down from there, because Drakken could have escaped even if the man had shaved his head completely, but the symbolism remained. It was meant to represent the loss of his freedom.

The polar bear ate the warden for desert in most of Drakken's daydreams.

"Well, by all means," Drakken began, relieved to hear the evil cackle rise as naturally as helium, though fortunately not as squeakily. "Lead the way, Shego."

By the time he blinked, Shego had almost disappeared from sight. A disorientated moment later, Drakken tore off in her wake, straining to keep apace with her - her legs were so much longer than his, proportionally speaking, and seemed to glide over the ground without ever truly touching it. Drakken imagined his own clumsy, ill-fitting prison sneakers chewing up the dirt as they passed over it and then spitting out behind them to lie in fresh-churned disarray, testifying to his villainous might. Shego vaulted over moss-covered rocks and hurtled fallen trunks without so much as breaking a sweat.

Drakken had broken a sweat - check that, he'd _shattered _a sweat, flung all over his face in sticky patches - by the time he caught up with her. His lungs throbbed back and forth inside his chest cavity, searching for the nearest supply of oxygen. They didn't find enough to keep Drakken from bending at the waist, hands on knees, the scent of dead leaves entirely too close now.

"If only the Olympic judges were here to see this." Shego's whisper was soft as a snake charmer's, but Drakken knew ridicule when he heard it.

His hands found his hips and clamped on. "I'm a mad scientist, not some bodybuilder hopeful!" The world seemed to fold in on him, but at this point his honor was far more vulnerable than his airways. "Besides, it's not like I was in some county jail with a _gym_! I never saw the outside of the glass!" Drakken spit the words at her, which sounded nice and scary before the gasps began to make supporting appearances. Drat.

Shego looked at him for no longer than a nanosecond before she flipped herself around and resumed jogging without any acknowledgment of the logic he'd just employed. Drakken remembered that about her - how she'd let even the most persuasive arguments roll right off of her and kept them rolling until they were too far away to challenge her stance. It was a stunning quality in a mercenary who planned to get the rest of the world to serve under her, but it boiled Drakken up inside when _she _was supposed to be serving under _him_.

Drakken took a moment to share a sigh with his loyal sock puppet. Shego's shoulders curled in disgust as she glanced back over one of them. Saying, silently, _I can't believe you ever made that thing._

Well, so what? It wasn't as if he'd ever gotten well enough acquainted with psychosis to think the puppet _was _Shego. He just needed someone to huddle with in the dark, in the everlasting cold. Someone to carry on a half-conversation with until the sound of his talking filled the room, pushing the walls away from each other and covering the silence that he could have sworn hyena-laughed at him.

_But it's okay now. It's over. Shego's here. You'll exact your vengeance. The world will bow. And you will be safe at long last._ Drakken torpedoed the thoughts straight at the newest round of shaking that wanted to come claim his body.

Some crow cawed, exactly the way it would in a horror movie, rustled in the branches above Drakken's head. It pumped renewed vigor to his calf muscles, and he shot off after his hired sidekick.

Before the pain receptors could even stir in Drakken's back, Shego came to an abrupt halt between two still-bushy pines. Abrupt, but neat. The girl had to have landing gear or something. Drakken's attempt to replicate it, toes lain flat, rocketed him into a forward-sprawl. He crash-landed into a patch of exposed soil and wondered for a dizzy moment if he had somehow left his legs behind.

He hadn't, of course. If anything, he might as well have grown two or three _extra _legs, based on how difficult it was to unwind his limbs from each other. Drakken could feel Shego's sneer scalding its way onto his skin without even needing to look at her.

When he _did _look, she had her left hand up in a stop sign, her right index finger aimed at the ground. A square outline was punched so deeply into the dirt in front of them that it appeared to have been pressed down with a bulldozer claw. A thrill raced up Drakken's spine and turned it to a dynamite fuse. Even _he_ probably would have walked by the thing entirely if Shego hadn't motioned to him.

Shego reached down and snagged hold of something that by all accounts could have been a ring of dead twigs and gave it a tug. Half the square lifted open on a rusted-out hinge, and darkness beckoned Drakken down a flight of stone steps. Darkness that belonged to _him_. Darkness that _he _had the codes to and could launch at will. Darkness that would envelop Kim Possible at an hour of _his _choosing.

Drakken swallowed back a squeal. "I've never had an _underground _lair before!" Didn't catch that exclamation point in time, but who cared?

"Yeah. Awesome. Just gonna remind you I'm not a realtor and you're gonna be disappointed if you want some gushy tour of the place." Shego's remarks were always basically notes on a music staff - either sharps or flats. This one was a sharp, and Drakken was glad. At least it _cared_, unlike the tone that sounded like it had been run down by a steam roller, as if none of this warranted a reaction way or the other.

With a casual flick of the mane, Shego descended the steps. In the instant before she vanished into the dark, Drakken watched her confident eyes pan from side to side as if everything she saw were already her domain. It was a marvelously malevolent look that Drakken did all he could to copy, though he knew didn't pull it off _quite _as seamlessly as Shego did - his eyes kept drifting too wide, popping in excitement.

And then he reached the bottom of the stairs, and he felt them slam down into skeptical slits.

He was standing in a single, giant, long-walled - _cellar _was the only word for it, and it sported carpet the exact color of pea soup, packed close and nubby like the top of a pool table. The geometry of the cellar messed with Drakken's mind - it had plenty of surface area but very little volume. After the rusty hinge creaked shut behind them, it took a good half-minute before the lights flickered on, and when they did, they were weak and watery as if they were shining up from the bottom of a shipwreck.

They were also directly above Drakken, so low that he could have blown any of them out with a good arm-flail. They were plugged deeply into a level surface that ran parallel to the floor, and they looked for all the world like they could smash together like the sides of a trash compactor. A truly classic death trap, and one with a highly efficient success rate - at least, according to the movies Drakken had seen. He should have been itching to throw Kim Possible in here and hear her cry for mercy that he wouldn't grant her after a year in cold storage.

But all Drakken could think was, _The ceiling is lowering! It's lowering - on _me_!_

And then he began to choke on something far beyond bitter, something far worse than any fish-oil tablet his mother ever forced him to take.

He was in the middle of his fifth-worst nightmare - no, _fourth_-worst, because he hadn't seen hide nor hair of a Ferbie in twenty years, so his scenario where he was attacked by a flock of mutinous ones was probably no longer rational. Drakken pulled his arms snug around his chest, locked them, clasping his own elbows, fortifying himself as best a madman could when denied weapons. Tried to breathe through whatever substance was sliming his throat.

It was enough to continue basic respiration and nothing more. _Of course, who would even notice if you stopped?_ That had been The Guard's favorite - and only - joke. _You're already blue!_

Typical intellectual inferior. As if there were no other symptoms of asphyxiation. Drakken knew Shego was bright, and he had to trust that she would be bright enough to pick up on the bulging eyes and the terrifying silence and all the other things he couldn't think about anymore, _couldn't_, not right now with the ceiling descending on him.

Drakken didn't realize his body was sinking until he felt his backside meet the floor. It gave beneath him, and Drakken allowed himself to imagine for a moment that it was damp shag carpet and not fungal life. His eyes slammed shut, too, as if all of his other organs had gotten together and decided on a plan of action without consulting his brain.

Normally at these times when the wheezing overtook him, even a blink would reveal a face painted on the inside of Drakken's eyelids - a distorted disturbance of his tormentors, as if they planned to go as a gruesome version of themselves for Halloween. This time, however, there was nobody. Nothing beyond a black pool with no lifeguard on duty, beckoning Drakken to swim ever deeper even as fear gnawed at his gut.

It was a thousand times scarier than anyone who could have appeared.

Not that he could have fought any of them off, anyway. His heartbeat was the strongest thing about him at this point, and even it quivered in his ears. Drakken crouched down farther with his knees together, hooked his arms over his throbbing head, and rocked back and forth to the best of his ability. To remain still was to rupture a blood vessel. Maybe two.

"Hey, Drakken," someone said to him. Whoever it was was young and female and didn't lay his name down with the appropriate veneration.

Drakken's mind snapped to Kim Possible, naturally, and his eyes flew open to shoot virtual lasers at his foe. She wasn't there. The green eyes matched hers almost exactly, but the long hair would have had to have been given a thorough dye job, and the lips were layered with both black lipstick and an attitude Kim Possible's perky teenaged persona would never have thought to cop.

Shego. Of course it was Shego. Drakken blinked up at her as a thousand terrors brewed inside him.

Shego angled her chin down at him. He'd always envied her that strong little scythe of a chin. "Yeah. Guess what, buddy? The Blitz ended, like, seventy years ago. You can stand up."

_Debatable._ Nevertheless, hearing Shego's voice was like feeling a cat's tongue - it scratched him with its abrasive texture, yet somehow managed to put every matted piece back where it was supposed to be.

Drakken caught on to the ends of his thoughts and cinched them tightly together, the way he would pull the strings on his poncho to get the hood to lie close to his head. As everything huddled together in the front of his brain, his temper came rushing in and offered to rescue him.

"_This _was the best place you could find?" he roared.

A very effective roar - the walls themselves shivered. Then again, that could have also been due to poor construction. Scars larger and nastier than the one on Drakken's cheek chased each other down their lengths, dripping green through the cracks. The whole place was rank with the smell of mold, and not the delightful kind that turned an orange you had forgotten you had into a science experiment. No, this was the kind that settled in your lungs and began to remake them in its own image, killing you one inhale at a time. Humidity seeped in from all four corners of the room.

He might as well have been living in a terrarium. Complete with crickets. Drakken could hear one tuning up for its nightly concert even now.

A tiny part of him sang along: _I want to go home!_

Shego took a step backward. Drakken saw surprise register in her eyes, but no alarm, as if she'd detected motion on one of the security cameras but was pretty sure it was just a moth trying to fly into the screen. "And what's that supposed to mean?" she said.

"What is it supposed to _mean_?" Drakken repeated in disbelief. He pressed all ten fingertips to his forehead. "It's supposed to mean that this place is disgusting and - and - and - nggh - cramped! So very cramped! Ghhk!"

Drakken jammed his foot into the ground with each word (or nonstandard equivalent) and only stopped because dust flew up into his face.

Shego didn't move at all this time, but the look she gave him came from much farther than one footstep away. "You were expecting a Hilton suite?"

"No, Shego!" Drakken's voice wasn't as quiet and deep as it should have been. It ricocheted off the ceiling - hardly a long journey - and then broke open on the floor, releasing what sounded embarrassingly close to a whine. "I was expecting a private island of sorts! All the great supervillains have private islands these days - Duff Killigan, Senor Senior, Senior! And I used to have one -"

Drakken let himself trail off. The abyss in his mind rapidly began to fill up with images of every villain he'd ever met. They looked upon him and his avowed goal of total global conquest with the same snickering they'd have spared a baby who climbed into a minivan and attempted to start the ignition with a set of giant bright-colored keys meant to be teethed on. Well, maybe not Senior. The man had always seemed to have been dealt an extra hand of decency.

(_Please, not Senior._)

Drakken was hardly in any position to prove them wrong, either. Listen to the homesickness echoing through him. He'd never thought of his lair as _home_, not before it blew up, but now he couldn't shoo away the thoughts of its mahogany furniture, its chairs whose long, pointed backs elevated you to a position of ruthlessness, its ceilings that met into perfect box tops far, _far _above where his hair could have grazed it.

His vision blurred - it had been too long since his contacts had been treated to the soothing touch of Saline - and three or four Shegos swayed before him, shimmering until he managed to squeeze them back into a single being.

"Look." _Everything _on Shego had turned into a scythe now, not just her chin, and she swung her hand forward with the finality of the Grim Reaper himself (or _her_self). "This place is in the middle of nowhere. It's functional. It's off Kim Possible's radar. _That _is what matters."

Drakken glared back at her, fury mangling his stomach, screams stacked in him from there all the way up to behind his teeth. He wanted to argue, wanted to say that this "place" was not a lair.

_Except it is_, Drakken admitted to only himself and only because he couldn't see so much as a faint gleam of glass around him. It was a stupid, shoddy lair, but it was a lair. A lair with a laboratory wing visible even from here and a bed and another room with a door that shut, maybe, hopefully, a bathroom.

Perhaps it would do until he could drag Kim Possible, gasping and broken, to him on all fours.

Yes, it was time to focus on his new arch-nemesis. It was time to stop being "mad" (in the sense of being "delusional" or "deranged") and start getting _mad_ (in the sense of "incensed" or "enraged"). There was a huge difference between anger and madness, and he'd dipped his toe into the shallow end of the former during his stint behind - well, no, there were no bars. Just glass, glass, glass, which had helped his sanity not a whit.

It would a relief, of sorts, to let his fragile hold on sanity go slack, as he had a few times in the past. But something had been fuzzy and. . . weird, for lack of a better word, about that relief. It bore a striking resemblance to that shining, blurring moment of euphoria that would drape over Drakken right before he passed out from letting three meals in a row slip his mind.

And madness tended to be mistaken for stupidity, even though all the research said it was much more closely related to genius. Another example of the ignorance at work in the world-at-large.

That world-at-large represented by Kim Possible, all of humanity's worst traits compressed into one skinny little filament of a girl. The simpering smile she'd worn as the police hauled Drakken away, kicking and screaming, had effectively crowned him with a dunce cap - as if this girl who in all likelihood hadn't even begun to study algebra surely knew idiotness when she saw it.

(_Idiocy_, that was the word. Thank goodness he wasn't giving that speech out loud. That slip would have nullified the truth of everything else he'd just said.)

She'd flitted in front of him and planted her adolescent awkwardness right in his path at their first meeting, demanding Drakken give up or she would have to blow the lair sky-high. And then she'd done it.

That lair was sturdy and reinforced and - and - _impregnable!_ He didn't even have time to consider that it might happen before he was standing in a pile of smoldering rubble that used to be ninety-nine percent of everything he owned. The rage, blast it, had brought tears to his eyes that Kim Possible had misinterpreted as a display of weakness.

There was something else about the girl that bothered him, too. There was something about her that drew people to her like yellow jackets to hot dogs or electrons to chlorine, whether it was her purposefully clever name or her ability to throw herself off the floor with the thrust of a pinkie and then perform a full loop-de-loop in midair. She laughed at gravity the same way she had laughed at him - confidence garnished with a side of disdain.

Drakken would be lying if he'd said he didn't envy her that quality.

Of course he did. That was what this scheme was all _about_. Kim Possible got his goat - make that a whole _petting zoo _of goats!

Silly girl had forgotten that goats had horns.

Yes, Drakken decided, being mad-angry was definitely going to do wonders for the kingly reputation he was working on building. If he couldn't reconstruct his wonderful island lair, at least he could add to his image, brick by brick. It also distracted him from the way the ceiling seemed to glower at him from not high enough above.

Disappointment hung heavy in Drakken's chest, but he went with it because at least it, too, was a distraction - from the parts of him that that were still wanting to coil in fear. He flapped an underwhelmed hand at the lair at large (make that _at too-small_). "I mean, I always imagined that if I moved on from the private island layout, it'd be because I'd have upgraded to something much cooler. Like an underwater hideout! Or the inside of a volcano. Although. . ." Drakken frowned, pondering. "I suppose a volcano would be much _hotter_. But have you ever noticed that the teens today use 'cool' and 'hot' almost interchangeably to show their approval? Those teenagers and their slang - "

"Do you know what 'can it' means?" Shego cut in, and that was no mere figure of speech. Her words ended in the same way her gloves did - in blades of steel.

Drakken nodded at her, and maybe he took a little too much pleasure in doing it, but so what? "I believe it means to stop talking."

Shego's green eyes broadened from their slits just long enough to roll. It hit him like a dodgeball to the ribs - a sensation the pre-Drakken Drew was all too familiar with - how young she was. For a crazy moment, he could picture her at a party on some campus somewhere, trying to decide whether or not to take the beer some sorority girl offered her. For an even crazier moment, he wanted to jump into his own imagination and swat the can out of Sorority Sister's hand. "Yeah. That was an imperative."

Drakken decided to respond with his Superiority Sniff. "Indeed."

(He actually didn't remember what an "imperative" was, but there was no chance he was going to ask Little Miss Collegian. She'd just load it into her lippy cannon and shoot it back at him.)

Still, no matter how much she mocked, he would not be dissuaded. To bring down the teenage beast, one must know how to communicate with the teenage beast.

Drakken sighed. "I suppose I can endure this lair for the time being."

The corners of Shego's mouth flicked up and down, up and down, faster than a roller coaster car. It dizzied Drakken to look at them. "Yeesh, if I'd known this place would freak you out this bad, I'd have -"

"Found a better one?" Drakken suggested.

"I was gonna say 'brought earplugs', but, yeah."

A "NNGGGGH!" sputtered from Drakken. He'd kind of given up keeping reign on them during his stint in the Big House.

Shego turned to survey her surroundings. If the lair was as unimpressive to her sensibilities as it was to his, she wasn't showing it - or anything else, for that matter. Just a smooth, strong nothingness that made the scraggling strands at the base of Drakken's neck itch like crazy.

Even more so when she rotated back to Drakken and raked her eyes over him in the same way. "Lemme guess: you're claustrophobic because your daddy used to lock you in some tiny closet when you were bad."

She gave even the word "daddy" a sardonic slash, but there was some strange out-reach in it, the way you invited someone to take a bite of something truly atrocious-tasting in order to confirm that your taste buds were correct and it was just sort of poison. But the words hurt him, and he didn't want her gross old food.

Drakken shook his entire body from head to toe before said body could begin shaking _him _first. His legs felt as rickety as the old wood that made up his mother's porch, but he didn't have to share that with Shego, especially not when she shared nothing with him. He imagined his tone to be bread dough and pounded the lumps out of it. It took more concentrated effort than it would have to artificially craft a new element.

"Oh, come now, that's ridiculous," Drakken told the both of them. "I am _not _some frightened child, and deep psychological bruises are _not _what is motivating me to conquer the world! I am a vicious, ruthless supervillain who desires only vengeance, glory, and domination of the massage-chair industry! Kim Possible shall soon see that she tangled with the wrong mad scientist."

No response for a moment. Smug now, Drakken let his shields drop.

And - _confound _it, he should have kept them up! A renegade sentence came flying out before he could find the command to abort it - "And besides, my father didn't stick around long enough to lock me in anything."

Silence fell. Although, to be honest, even the word "fell" itself wasn't clumsy or cumbersome enough to describe the silence that smacked down on them. Shego's mouth didn't flicker this time. It twisted to the side of her face in an inky knot.

"Fantastic," she said at last, still secreting sarcasm. "By the way -"

Drakken glanced up just in time for a rumple of cloth to come flying toward him and bash him in the torso.

"- here's your dorky lab coat," Shego continued. "Better go get changed unless you _like _the look that screams, 'Escaped convict'!"

Drakken stared at her for a moment. She had just spoken beautiful words, but the way her voice crunched them up tight almost wiped the magic right out of them. They deserved to be lilted over, almost _sung_.

Shego turned her hands over, palms up - and plasma off, which should have made them less intimidating. "Ditch the jail duds," she said. "And maybe lose the sock puppet while you're at it?"

She finished by snickering. Drakken was attacked by the same feeling that always roughed him up when Professor Dementor saw him and began spewing out German - that he was being made fun of in a foreign language.

For the first time, though, Drakken was aware of how much _warmer _this lair was. After his escape from one of the most dismally cold places on the planet, the muggy, humid air should have sizzled steam right off his skin - or at least settled into a nice threatening smolder. Instead, it weighed down on his skin like strips of waterlogged wool, serving as a reminder of just how _very _much of him was exposed by his prison-issue striped tee and swim-trunk bottoms.

Drakken pulled himself up taller, flattened his eyebrow at her, snatched his lab coat closer to his too-visible body, and scampered for the first room he could find with a toilet inside. He was going to go ahead and conclude that that was the bathroom. (If not, this place's aesthetics were even weirder than he'd imagined.) Drakken closed the door behind him and locked it, because he could feel The Guard breathing down his neck even from four countries away, not to mention the walls sliding in on him like the sides of a boa constrictor, crushing and wrapping until its prey - the great Dr. Drakken - was suffocated.

One fist flew to his throat, and the other pressed so hard against his lips that Drakken thought it wanted to jump _down _his throat.

_Get a grip! _Drakken commanded himself. _You're a supervillain. You can do this. You can destroy everything that ever dared scare you!_ It was the same speech he'd given himself back in the hoosegow when he'd been sure he didn't have the strength to make it through another day of loneliness, when he couldn't bear to role-play Kim Possible's destruction one more time.

It didn't take long to shed his prison clothes. When he'd first been ushered into the glass cell, they'd fit him as if they'd been welded onto him, but now they hung emptily from his shoulders and hips. What he had remaining of either. The cool caress of his lab coat and matching pants was more comforting than any _actual _caress Drakken had ever received. He was just pulling his collar over his head when he caught a whiff of the fabric and forgot what he was doing for a moment or five.

It was the scent of his island lair. All he had to do was inhale and, as if transported by TARDIS, he was back to scribbling down his latest scientific discovery on a piece of paper at his scratched-and-dinged desk, back to allowing himself a brief nap on his squishy, burnished red couch, back to plotting against Kim Possible while he leaned against his wide, horned chair.

Drakken sniffed and sniffed and sniffed until his nasal passages were completely clogged with memories.

_Remind me to get out my chemistry set, extract this smell, and bottle it!_ It would keep as a reminder of everything he'd lost at the hands of Kim Possible. Kim Possible, who had probably never lost so much as a pet goldfish or a favorite stuffed animal, much less a home. . . base.

Drakken ripped his sock puppet off his hand but didn't have the heart to toss her into the trashcan beside an empty paper-towel roll and a dried-up bleach wipe. She was pretty high-quality for having been whipped up in a place where he had very few materials to work with. And she smiled at him without sneaky shadows behind it, which Shego didn't. He compromised by plunging her so deep into his pockets that Shego would never find her.

With fingers shaking less now that he was back in his own clothes, Drakken turned the doorknob and strutted back out into his new lair. Shego wordlessly handed him his old boots and gloves, which he donned without hesitation. There! The image was complete.

Now on to the reputation.

Drakken rubbed his hands together, the marvelous familiar friction of his gloves only adding to his glee. The fear had fled, and in its place hopped the anticipation of doing something absolutely _terrible_. "Now - may I see the laboratory wings?"

"Knock yourself out." Shego walked over and pressed her hand to a black panel that looked like a crow feather in the tundra against the unrelenting gray of the back wall.

Drakken shivered. Ugh. Shouldn't have thought of the tundra.

But he couldn't keep his thoughts on the tundra for _any _length of time once the back wall scrolled up and Drakken stepped into a room of coolest cerulean with light fixtures casting wavy panels on the walls as if he truly _had _dived underwater. The ceiling wasn't much higher, maybe a bump or two, but the room seemed more substantial when one factored in the enormous computer command system hugging the wall, the circular platform rising dramatically from the center of the room in sloping concrete steps, and - best of all - the robot incubator tucked like a secret into the side wall.

Drakken ran over and threw his arms around it. And, okay, maybe he had spent a little too much time in jail, because he could have sworn it hugged him back. "It's perfect! It's wonderful! Did you fire it up as I instructed?"

"All fired, Chief. It's cooking in there. You ready to take a look?"

She had to be kidding again. _Ready_? She might as well have been asking Thomas Alva Edison if he was "ready" to finally succeed at creating the incandescent light bulb. "Yes!" Drakken gasped - had to gasp so he wouldn't squeal.

In the foggy metal surface that appeared to have been dusted casually with someone's sleeve, Drakken saw his reflection - his heaving chest, his black circles the size of parking lots under his eyes, his pallid blue skin. The kind of sight that made pretty little preteen girls turn away with a shudder. Drakken had hunted through his two-hundred-count pack of crayons - a gift from Mother that probably hadn't survived the explosions, either - looking for one that matched his own tint, and the closest he could find was called "Absolute Zero."

Fitting, Drakken supposed, though he never shared it with anyone. It helped him remember what the other villains saw him as and the temperature he would have to operate at to disprove them.

Kim Possible was soon going to wish she had stuck to baby-sitting.

The little round, green light that gazed steadily back at him was easily the loveliest part of the entire unattractive lair. Drakken's heartbeat migrated to the roof of his mouth. The rest of the lair could have been struck by lightning at this very moment, and he wouldn't have cared as long as he had _this _light on _this _machine. Although such a scenario was highly unlikely, considering how far underground they were. Underground was the safest place to be during a thunderstorm, followed by cars, but not because of the old wives' tale about the rubber tires insulating you from shock. It was really. . .

_FOCUS, Drakken, _he instructed himself.

Drakken gave the button beside the light a wobbly push - hopefully, Shego wouldn't see just _how _wobbly. The machine buzzed just like an oven would to announce that your cookies were ready, only this was a thousand times more satisfying, more invigorating, more. . . appetizing than even a batch of homemade snickerdoodles. The stasis tray unlatched and slid out at the absolute perfect speed: slow enough to be dramatic, but not so slow as to aggravate him.

By the time the tray had hissed to a misty halt, fully spread, Drakken had become a pinball machine, his nerves _ping-ping-ping_ing. His heels left the floor, and his fingertips crept closer together and twiddled with the excitement no human being could possibly hide.

Except Shego. Her eyes still expressed nothingness as they glanced down at the marvelous silhouette of silicon overlaid with soft-brown synthetic skin. Her body language was puzzling, too - for as tight as she was standing, you would imagine her to care what was going on, but she also held her barbed-wiry frame effortless and still and indifferent. Then again, most human beings couldn't produce green rays from their hands, either. Drakken wasn't entirely sure Shego was entirely human.

_Oh, speaking of which. . . _

Propped up before him was the beginning of the robot who had been left to simmer while Drakken was in jail. Crock-pots had nothing on this. The machine was so brilliantly designed, even by Dr. Drakken standards, that all Shego had had to do was tap the button for "fourteen-year-old female," saving them both the time-consuming - and frankly embarrassing - job of having to carve her body themselves.

Life painted a stroke of happiness across the wasteland Drakken had become in the last year.

The girl's face was blank now - truly, literally blank, unable to return his smile. Her body also stood blank, just an outline, no details or clothing. And her mind was blankest of all, a fresh snowfall just waiting for Drakken to jump into and leave his footprints everywhere.

What footprints he was planning to leave, too! He would program her, fill her with all the loyalty and adoration and respect he couldn't seem to find in anyone else. _She_, at least, would obey.

Something far beyond pride in his accomplishment swept over Drakken and turned him wobbly again. No, "wobbly" didn't accurately convey the way the room swayed around him, the way only her outline remained bright as if it had been constructed from glow-sticks. She was already beautiful.

This had to be the way fathers felt in the delivery room - minus the trauma of having just watched the woman they loved shove a person out of her body.

_But she's not yours_, said a thought that must have hidden behind a long string of intelligence and sneaked its way into Drakken's brain. _Even though you're going to program her. You stole most of those parts. You weren't even the one to push the button and start her up. . ._

Moralistic hogwash. And all Drakken needed to get rid of it was a sharp jerk of his head to one side. Just because the master chef didn't mill the flour and lay the eggs himself didn't mean he should get no credit for his own cake.

"Behold!" he bellowed.

Shego parked a hand on the buttonless side of the stasis tray and threw another look at Drakken's new android. She blinked. Had to be an impressed blink - it just _had _to. "So, how is it going to help us?"

Drakken jolted, winced, and slapped his own hands over the robot's ears. "'She'!" he corrected, and wondered too late if that would be confusing to Shego, him just firing back with the first syllable of her name. It would be like if she suddenly screamed, "Drak!"

He should have known that it took more than that to throw Shego off.

"She's a 'she'?" Shego said.

The scientist in Drakken compelled him to say, "Well, not _technically_." Forget the delivery room. He was back in his cramped third-grade classroom, staring down at the Classifying Nouns worksheet marked up with red on the slot where he'd written "robot" under _Person _instead of _Thing._ They were wrong. _Thing_s did not have workable arms and turnable necks and tappable toes. "She. . . she identifies as a 'she'! That's a thing among the youth, right?"

Shego closed her eyes as if the wavery, underwater light was too much for them. "That is a conversation I refuse to have with you, Drakken."

"Fine by me!" Drakken sniffed at her and folded his arms tight, Xing her out.

"So. . . does 'she' have a name?" Shego's droll voice had the first lift of interest he'd heard in it all day. But she sounded like someone asking a child to talk more about their pet guinea pig. It wouldn't quench his soul any more than salt water would quench his thirst, yet Drakken still dove for it and drank it down anyway.

"Athena." Drakken dropped his arms and inflated his chest bigger and bigger until his ribs said _ow_, and even then he only let it fall back a notch or two. "It's the Roman goddess of hunting."

Shego sank onto a cheap-looking plastic chair, rearranged her legs, and from the pouch on one pulled out an object that it took Drakken several seconds to recognize as a nail file. Or, in her case, a _blade_-file. "No, it isn't," she said.

It was Drakken's turn to blink. _Gggh_. . . it was as if he'd spit into the wind just in time for it to change directions and blow right back at him. "What do you mean, 'no, it isn't'?" he demanded.

"Artemis is the Roman goddess of hunting. And the moon." Shego gave her blades an impatient rub. "Athena is some _Greek _goddess."

Drakken took a step backward and then danced forward again before she could notice. "Of _what_, Miss Smarty-Pants?"

"I don't know." Shego's face honed into a point you could have cut a steak with. "I'm not Google."

Could have fooled Drakken. Quick, efficient, and always obnoxiously correcting his spelling? Sounded like Google to him.

"I'll look it up later," Drakken grumbled, and then froze. A chasm opened up inside him, the part that felt tough and capable now a steep ravine away from the part of him he could display. It took him beyond wobbly once again.

_Tremulous_. That was it. That was the perfect word.

And the second he located the perfect word, the second it ceased to describe him. There were no more tremors, shakes, or quakes afflicting any part of Dr. Drakken's anatomy, outside or in. He was in the epicenter, watching the world burn down around him.

Drakken batted his wrist, cool and flexible, and turned away from Shego's eyes, which still called him a flake. "At any rate, her name shall still be Athena!"

From behind him, Drakken heard Shego groan. That was also fine by him. People didn't tend to do that when they won, not unless they'd realized their mother was losing every game on purpose to make them feel better. That was exactly what would happen if he changed her name to Artemis - Shego would win.

A kinder person would have granted Shego a victory now and again. But after being imprisoned in twelve months of winter, Drakken was certain there was nary a scrap of kindness left in him anymore.

Besides, "Artemis" was too stiff and starched a name, as if she were the Roman goddess of Safety-Pinning Your Hand-Me-Down Clothes So You Don't Fall Out of Them. "Athena" swung wider, a panorama of opportunity, a sweep of everything she could be. Everything _Drakken _could be with her help.

"Well, _whatever _her name is - " Shego's lip curled a tad, letting him know that wasn't the last he'd hear of this - "how does she fit into our plan?"

Sunrise. Drakken hadn't seen a sunrise in a discouragingly long amount of time, and yet now he remembered what they felt like, because one was happening inside him right now. "I'm so glad you asked, Shego!" he cried, uncurling his fists and popping up his index finger. "We all know Kim Possible thinks she's all that. And she may be right. But what if someone came along who was all-thatter than her?"

"Points off for grammar," Shego muttered. Drakken didn't look at her, didn't want to see what, if anything, she was communicating in that moment.

"Points off for. . . being. . . snide. . . ness!" Drakken grabbed the first words to volunteer for active duty and flung them out. It was the only way to beat Shego to the verbal-punch, which often felt far too similar to an _actual _punch.

_You can do this. You can elaborate. You are a genius. You _are _a _genius_!_

"What if someone came along who was a better athlete, a smarter student, a prettier cheerleader, and a more dependable friend?" Drakken clarified. "How do you think Kim Possible would feel then?"

Shego didn't answer this time. The crooked smile that streaked across her face like the shooting stars most people didn't know were meteorites said everything for her. Drakken got the strange, warm-washcloth sensation that they both knew a secret, that they were the only two people in the whole world who had deciphered the pirate's map to his hidden treasure. Together.

His lonely heart made a dive for it.

"We shall strike on the day she is most vulnerable!" Drakken continued. Vicious warmth flowed through him, so different from the angry heat that began behind his forehead and drizzled down to his fingertips. No, this _started _in his fingertips and scudded upward, ever higher, until it engulfed the whole of him, put a wall of magma between him and his enemies. "A day that can reduce the most confident adolescent to a sniveling mess!" Big pause. "The first day of high school!"

A shudder he didn't anticipate turned each of Drakken's nerves to pinball-flippers again. He tried to mask it with a brisk march in place, but it didn't escape Shego's eagle eyes.

"I mean, if it can break you, it can break anybody, right, Drakken?" Shego said. Much too innocently.

Drakken decided to filter out the sass, decided not to let anything spoil the moment. His reply of "Quite" had its own ironic bite. And as he threw back his head to laugh maniacally - how he _loved _to do that! - he once again envisioned the trash compactor's walls clapping shut, only on Kim Possible this time.

Not with her between them - as delicious as his wilder side found that prospect. Even worse. With her _behind _them, and everything she had ever lived for on the other side, unreachable forever.

She would know what it was to be an outcast.


	3. Status Report 1-point-0

**~Annd. . . here's Athena!**

**Seriously, I am super-excited to introduce my version of her. I hope you all enjoy.~**

3\. _Status report 1.0_

_Twelve-hundred-hours. September 3rd, 2018. _

_Activated._

"Athena!"

The first thing I hear is my name, rumbled in a large voice, pounding me into consciousness. I open my eyes, and all around me is darkness, with only the slimmest of blue light shivering restlessly across the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Enormous shapes loom in the background as my optical sensors adjust to the correct brightness level. In the foreground stand two human figures, one strong and sleek and perfect, the other with a certain lopsided, irregular strength to it as well that is overshadowed by the crooked way it stands.

"Athena! Can you hear me?" The voice is still deep and rough-cut, but it is trying to be gentle; it is trying so hard. It is a _man's _voice, my newly-animated brain tells me, and I connect it with the man standing before me now.

He steps closer, and dim as the light is, it still throws him into focus. His eyes are dark and black-bagged, his skin a pastel shade of blue, his arms too long to match his legs.

And even though I have never seen him before, recognition buzzes through my circuits.

This is Dr. Drakken. My programmer. Creator.

Father.

"Do you know who I am?" Drakken says. He tips my chin up so that I am looking him full in the face, blinking into his tender eyes, staring at the scar that lashes down one cheek. I want to destroy whoever and whatever put it there. I will avenge this man all his pain and suffering.

I nod, and the fresh, untested rods in my neck squeak. I cringe at the sound. If we are fortunate, that will wear off before I am dropped onto the outskirts of my target's life, before I crawl into it and pull it apart from the inside.

"Yes," I say. "You are Dr. Drakken." I see the fear leave him at the sound of my voice. It is soft and murmurs pleasantly, no sign of anything mechanical, anything unnatural. I will have no trouble disappearing into a group of fourteen-year-old girls. "You're in charge."

To say Drakken is happy with this answer is an understatement of the highest degree. His smile glows brighter than the polished metal that he just pulled me from, so full of joy it seems it will never empty, and he runs it around the lair. The reward center in my brain lights up, like a human's would if they received a rush of dopamine. "Did you hear that?" he says, maybe to the second figure, maybe to no one, maybe to everyone.

The second figure, a woman, makes a noise in her throat - the part of me encrypted to be a realistic teenager identifies it immediately as a _scoff_. Her hair is a shiny black fall down her back, her lips two shiny black streams on her face. I know her, too. She is Shego, Drakken's assistant, the one responsible for my youthful-attitude programming. This might make her my mother, but one look at her and I know I will never call her that. She folds her arms and regards me with an expression interested but noncommittal.

"Yeah, but does she know who _I _am?" Shego says.

"You're Shego," I report. "You're to be listened to, too."

Shego smiles completely differently than Drakken does. Only one corner of her mouth turns upward, and the smile is spread as thin as the smallest wire in the depth of my ear. "Yeah, and don't you forget it, kid." She reaches over and sets a hand on my arm, right at the hinge, testing me, assessing. Someday I will fight her and I will lose on purpose, but for now I allow her to touch me. I get the feeling we are sisters in steel, and I decide I like Shego, despite the fact that I feel no tenderness in her.

Or maybe because of it.

"Athena!" Drakken barks my name, but his eyes soak me in. "Are you aware of your mission?" He rocks up and down on his toes, his fingertips busy with each other, his frame vibrating. He makes enthusiasm look painful, and I am glad I don't feel it in the same way he does.

I nod again, pleased to hear less squeaking this time. "My mission is to ruin Kim Possible."

Hatred flares in his eyes when he hears her name, and I can feel mine mirroring his. I have not met her, Kim Possible, but I will. She is the one responsible for my father being imprisoned in a room that was all glass and no windows, all winter and no Christmas. She did it to this man, this man who bothered to give me a name, this man still smiling at me like I am perfect. It will be my pleasure to break her, one cut after another.

"Yes, yes, yes! Yes, you wonderful thing, yes!" Drakken wraps me up in what I know to be a hug. Even through his thick sleeves and his sweat, I can feel the delicacy of his bones. So easy to snap.

No wonder he needs me.

When Drakken lets go, he turns back to Shego; he gloats. He catches onto her hand, which she tugs away from his with a glare. "See? She understands immediately!" Drakken says. "I told you this would be so much more efficient than hiring a new batch of henchmen!"

Every word runs through me like a power surge. Drakken appears to have experienced a power surge himself, his back suddenly straight, one finger poking upward in wisdom. In this moment, he seems tougher than his skeleton felt against my metal one.

Shego is less than excited. I can see it in the sigh that sags from her, in the fierce roll of her eyes. "For Pete's sake, Dr. D. . ." she mutters. "That's the last time I let _you _design some poor sad robotic girl."

I stare at her in unease.

Drakken goes farther than that. His hands shoot to his hips, and he snarls, "What is _that _supposed to mean?"

"Oh, where do I begin?" Shego crosses over to me and lifts a string of my hair. "The greasy, grimy hair, for one thing. The dweeb-clothes. The dirty face. And - holy heck, did you give her _skin _problems?"

I stare harder at her. And then, somewhere inside, a sting. She shouldn't care about my physical appearance.

"That's the _point_, Shego!" Drakken says. "She can't look like a threat right away! That would wreck everything! No, here's the plan: we present her as a dorky, mousy little freshman who's had a rough first day, and Kim Possible, with her weak, compassionate heart, will not be able to resist taking the poor dear under her wing! Helping her fit in and make friends and the like." The words don't match the contempt squeezing his face. "And then - surprise! After a makeover, she's gorgeous. After she makes friends, she becomes Middleton High's new Queen Bee. She out-Kim-Possibles Kim Possible!"

He has such faith in me. The metal within me grows stronger, until I am something impenetrable, something untouchable.

Shego drops my hair and steps back, smirking. She knows what a great idea this is, I'm sure, but she can't bring herself to praise Drakken. Something stiff hangs between them that I suspect only she and I notice is there.

"So it's my job to seem pathetic?" I ask.

"Yes." Drakken turns back to me, and he drops his hands onto my shoulders. "They're going to label you a loser those first few days, my Athena. Don't take it to heart."

"I won't," I say. A spark of anxiety catches in the same space where I felt the sting of Shego's words, but I am strong; I am flexible. I will not be bent by pliable, insecure, half-grown humans.

I will play pathetic, but only so they can't see me coming.

"Attagirl." Gratitude pours from his clammy palms as Drakken squeezes my shoulders and then releases them. "Together, we shall snuff out the spark that makes Kim Possible. . . possible."

It's stupid wordplay, but I appreciate it.

I turn to Shego and upload what my database informs me is known as a _smug grin_. She actually appears happy to see it. "I mean, after all," she says, leaning toward me, "you're talking to an _expert _high-school loser."

The air in the room tightens, and then it explodes.

Dr. Drakken explodes. He whirls on Shego, eyes poisonous, mouth spewing what might be threats or demands if they would shape themselves into words. His anger flying all directions. But I am not fooled, and neither is Shego, by the looks of it.

He is a tightly-wound collection of bone, skinny muscle, and pride, all of which try to be mightier than they are. The damage he wears in his scar is not something prison did to him. It's the remains of a cut that Kim Possible didn't start; she just happens to the one left holding the knife.

They both give off heat - a steady stream from Shego, an unfocused barrage from Drakken. I don't know what to do. Comfort him, perhaps, but that's not in my programming. I can be witty; I can be charming; I can be devastating. I have _not _ever been told how to break up a fight between the only two humans I care for.

But isn't comfort just the sharing of relevant information that will please someone?

I open my mouth and give it a try. "You don't have to worry. Either of you. I am gonna trample Kim Possible into the _ground_."

It works. Drakken's smile returns, brighter than the faint lights in the room, though I can't rid myself of the observation that it somehow seems even shakier. "That is - this is - this is just - _bodacious_!" he cries.

I feel a circuit connect behind my eyes as I roll them. "Drakken," I admonish him, "nobody says 'bodacious' anymore."

"Score," Shego says. She stops halfway through grinning at me, and I somehow know it is the closest I will come to earning her praise.

The scowl that finds Drakken is so brief it might have only been a momentary glitch on his lips. "Indeed. Yes, of course," he says. "The teenage attitude works beautifully, just as I thought it would! I was - I was only testing it! And you, Athena, passed with flying colors."

Colors fly through my reward center, too. All of them vibrant.

A chain of code in my brain instructs me to exchange smirks with Shego. I obey.

"Well, it looks like you two are going to get along famously." Drakken cocks his head back, and a glint enters his eyes. "I hope you can remember how to act like enemies when the time comes."

Right. Enemies. I press a button inside my manufactured heart.

Shego's face switches over quickly, as if she also only needs the push of a button to alter it. All remnants of playfulness drain from her eyes, turning them hard and metallic, slanting them downward. Her upper lip crawls back and stays propped there, her arms sharp and ready by her sides.

My battle face reads much differently - set in concentration, not a trace of hatred seeping its way through my features, eyebrows pulled low over eyes that seek only justice. The hard and metallic truth of me must stay hidden; Kim must think that I began my life in a hospital fourteen years ago, instead of just today in this very room.

To anyone looking at us, there would be no doubt that Shego is the villain and I am the hero. A conclusion everyone must come to. A conclusion, Drakken snickers in my programming, built of layers and layers of lies.

"Excellent!" Drakken claps his hands. "I suppose now is as good a time as any for you to practice your sparring."

"We get to _fight_?" Shego says. Her hands draw back toward her chest, readying the flames of plasma hidden inside them.

I glance at Drakken to gauge the appropriate emotional reaction. When I fight Shego in the future, when I just barely lose to her in front of Kim, I will need to seem afraid, at least afraid enough so no one will guess we are on the same side. But for right now, I don't know how to feel without him telling me. He, too, has pulled a cold veneer over his face, but it's not as thick as Shego's. Not thick enough to hide the trust that seeps from every crack, every place where the icy sides don't touch.

He believes in me, and he nods at me to believe in myself, too.

I smile and pull up my self-defense database, cross-referencing between several different types of martial arts. The contortions are all the weapons I need.

"Just a little skirmish to confirm that your combat skills are mission-ready," Drakken says. "You don't need to tear the lair apart around you." He chuckles, a tight sound that quickly dissolves into bitterness as he adds, "After all, we've all had enough of _that _to last a lifetime."

Bitterness that doesn't mask the fold in his forehead.

My facial-recognition software identifies it as _loss_ or _regret_. The former lair, of course, the one large enough to claim an entire land mass, now a scorched jumble of rubble, so that he ends the scheme with less than when he started. It is pinned into the revenge portion of my mind, directly next to Drakken's imprisonment and Kim's sneer as he was led away.

All I see now are thin strings of blue light. Drakken is indistinguishable from them until he says, "And don't hurt her."

"I'm not gonna hurt her, Drakken." Shego's muscles are closely coiled, her pale skin almost glimmering, almost silver.

"I was talking to Athena," Drakken says.

Only Shego's mouth moves. "You're _joking_, right?"

He isn't. He has retreated to an elevated pathway and is screened behind the guardrail, hands behind his back, wearing a satisfied grin, the grin of a man invulnerable. I think of the fragile bones I felt pressing against me in his hug. I think of his voice, a voice that is a grim command all by itself, a voice that still trembles as though someone else controls him.

Drakken is a paradox. Earlier robots, less sophisticated ones, I glean from the data he has given me, would not even be able to process him.

I turn and wait for Shego to make the first move.

One of the other advantages I have over most other robots is my immunity to rust. But standing here still as a dead battery, waiting for Shego to slam into me, grates on me the way I imagine rust would. It's imperative that she attack me first, though, that I only respond with defensive moves. It will convince everyone that I am a heroine.

Shego comes within inches of me and hurls herself at my legs, plasma heating her grab. I was wrong about the rust. Instead of slowing my reflexes, this scraping I feel inside me speeds them up, grinds them faster. I duck to the ground, so close I can see silver chips in the stone floor, the palms of my hands the only things keeping me upright.

That frees my legs to twist behind me into a place Shego doesn't expect them to be - right onto the point of her chin. She falls backward with a thump and a gritty growl.

She isn't done.

I crouch on my heels again, running one foot along the scored stone. I can't hurt her. It is more than just a preference; there is something in my very CPU pressing into me I should never hurt Shego.

Shego takes another plasma shot at me, which I dodge with a jump to the right at the very last second. With one leg in the air, she takes aim for me. I slip beneath her, pop up, send her to the ground. As she falls, she makes a dive for my wrist, and I feel her heartbeat in her fingers for an instant before I smack them away. Once again, I cut it as close as possible so she doesn't have time to brace her other hand and hits the floor hard, her breath knocked away.

_Please, please, stay down._

Shego won't let herself groan, but she hisses, and there's pain in it. Pain and anger that cloud her judgment in a way they will never cloud mine. I can't allow another attack. For both our sakes.

I spring through the air and land on top of her, straddling her and resting the flat of my foot against her collarbone. Her elbows jab upward, trying to find me, and my hands fall on top of them, pinning them at her sides in the span of a blink. If I were human, if I were flesh and blood and tendon, I wouldn't be able to do it; I simply wouldn't be fast enough.

It's not a fair fight, and I want it to end.

"All right, Athena!" Drakken's shout from above wavers, and I know he agrees with me. "I've seen all I need to see!"

I climb off Shego and offer a hand down to her. She neither takes it nor swats at it, just ignores it as she rises to her feet and dusts off her jumpsuit. Her face is sweat-streaked, furious, and beautiful.

I am dry and clean.

"You passed again, Athena!" Drakken cries and I turn to face him. He is one of the thin blue strings of light, and someone has flipped him on brighter than any of the others in the room. "Way to go!"

Shego growls. My wiring tries to stretch in two opposite directions.

"No hard feelings?" I say to her.

She tosses off a harsh laugh that is both yes and no. "Look at you," she says. "You don't even sweat. Man, you're gonna have to fix that, Drakken, if you want her to be believable."

Drakken waves a hand. "Nah. I think I'll keep her as is. If it gets to you, then it'll turn Kim Possible into a basket wreck."

"Basket case," Shego and I say at the same time, Shego with her teeth clenched together.

"Awww, look at her." Drakken sweeps out his arms. "Taking after you already."

This is one area where I differ from Shego. She rolls her eyes immediately, but I can't roll mine until the glow in my reward center stops.

The corners of Shego's mouth tweak upward, stopping before they reach a smile. I can imagine her touching my brain, telling me this is called a _smirk_. "Let's not celebrate yet, okay? We got a few more things to test."

Drakken's face goes blank then, the confident expression deleted. "Such as?" he says.

"Such as - making sure she comes across as a normal teenage girl and not a ninja robo-assassin."

"She's not an _assassin_," Drakken mutters. He shakes himself and says, "Er, yes, that was exactly what I was about to suggest," and I get the feeling I am not the only one here wearing artificial skin.

Shego turns around to face me, gives me a searching glance. "So, Athena. What's your last name, and how'd you get saddled with a first name like _that_?"

"She-go!" Drakken protests.

"What? They're gonna ask."

I concentrate only on Shego and my immediate answer to her; we are two processing units passing information we share back and forth. "My last name is Smith. My parents didn't want me to disappear into the sea of a billion other Smiths." I shrug lightly. Carelessly. "So - I'm Athena."

"And what do you do if Kimmy wants to come over to _your _house instead of invite you to hers?" Shego leans closer. I notice the muscles in her arms still lie bunched and rigid, even though the fight is over, as if she must be ready for another one at any moment. The posture of a human who trusts no one.

"I imply that my house is really small and run-down and kind of shabby, and it would be _waaaay _too embarrassing to invite anyone from school over." I survey the lair and begin a smirk of my own. "Which, when you think about it, isn't really that much of a lie."

I watch Drakken flinch, the ashy skin under his eyes folding, but he does not argue. He would if he could, I know. He doesn't like this lair, either.

"Perfect," Shego says. "Play the sympathy card as much as you can with Kimmy. She's got that savior-of-the-world complex thing going on. It's a little disgusting."

I nod.

"My turn," Drakken says. He presses his palms together and breathes, long and heavy. "Athena, what are you going to say when Kim Possible and her goofy friend meet at their fast-food place after school and wonder why you're not eating anything?"

This one is trickier. I can tell by the startled lowering of Shego's eyebrows that even she wasn't told before now that I'm not able to eat. I know exactly what restaurant Drakken is talking about: Bueno Nacho, downtown, on an intersection, a forty-five-minute walk from this location. I also know Kim will stand by me as a friend, regardless of whether or not I eat at this restaurant, but this is still an enormous test. One I cannot fail.

One I _will not _fail.

I take a quick scan of my databanks, sifting through truths and falsehoods and every murky thing in the middle. The first thing I find is a magazine study exposing Bueno Nacho and its fast-food relatives for their unhealthy foods. Reminding everyone that they will wear every taco they eat on their thighs for the rest of their lives.

My thighs are steel and will not change shape unless held to an open flame. Nevertheless, I know this is my answer.

"I tell them I'm on a diet," I say. My lip curls back as it should.

It is Drakken who cries, "Perfect!" this time. He rubs his hands together, and a smile tangles over his face, dark and destructive. It clashes terribly with his round cheeks and soft forehead. "A dorky, mousy, insecure little freshman with _bulimia_, no less!"

I open my mouth to correct him, but Shego beats me to it. "You mean _anorexia_, Doc," she says.

His smile drops. "Say wha?"

"When you starve yourself, that's anorexia." Shego crouches closer, and I see the same hard, heated glint in her eyes as when she lunged at me with her plasma flaming. "Bulimia is when you binge-eat and then puke it all back up. Ya know, sort of like you at our Fourth of July picnic last year. Remember, the pudding cups?"

Drakken's blue skin takes on fiery pink, humiliation in disguise as anger. "That is factually irrelevant, Shego!"

The part of me that Shego formed can see the humor in the situation. But the larger portion of me, the one that owes itself to my father, can only see a desolate glass cell, and it repulses me as if I were its prisoner.

"The _point _is," Drakken says, "she's going to come across as a painfully shy and lonely freshman with an eating disorder. Oooh, Kim Possible is going throw herself under the _bus _for her!"

"Not a bad idea." Shego, too, breaks into a twisted grin, and there is no contradiction there. Her beautiful face is equally comfortable with pleasantness and annihilation.

Drakken's eyes narrow, but not before I notice something jump across them. Something almost frightened, almost bruised. "That's _not _part of the plan, Shego!"

I have to direct us back to our mission before my originators somehow trap me between them.

"She _knows _that, Drakken," I say with a heavy sigh. It may be rude, but it is needed, and I can almost feel Shego's influence within me applauding. "It's just an ex_press_ion."

"Now _that's _convincing," Shego says, still smiling.

Drakken nods. He seems to be staring at some point far off into the distance, so I jump a little when he speaks again and his voice is clear and alert, right there beside me. "Indeed it is! Athena, show me your 'before' look."

Together, they have implanted enough infomercials in my mind that I know what he means. I am now to imitate the poor girl before she discovered acne cream, the poor woman before she lost the weight, the poor man before he started taking vitamins to restore his thinning hair.

I duck my head forward. My hair falls in dirty, limp clumps on either side of my face, hiding it, my chin angled out. I bite into my bottom lip in case it is still visible. My arms I clamp over my chest and I squeeze them hard, as if I am trying to shrink myself down to a less noticeable size.

From behind my hair, I hear Shego's voice: "Awww. That almost makes ME feel sorry for her. Now, if only she could cry on cue."

A flash goes through me; I know something she doesn't.

"Ohh, but she ca-an!" Drakken sings. "Athena, waterworks!"

He barely finishes speaking the words before I reach up and pinch a simulated nerve on the back of my neck. Instantly, my eye sockets fill with fluid, strange and slippery. I shake my hair back because there is no point in crying if they can't see it, and the fluid rolls down my cheeks. It is warm, salty. Believable, to the best of my knowledge.

"Yikes." Shego takes a step closer to me, squints to study me. "How'd you do that?"

"Saline," Drakken says. The macabre grin is back on his gentle-looking face, and I am reminded of my data on knee-high socks and flip-flop sandals: not wrong apart, but a no-no together, never matching. "It's not just good for contact lenses."

I know what contact lenses are, too: the less-geeky alternative to eyeglasses. My father gifted me the perfect vision he does not have.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Drakken says. He rocks up on his heels again, hope practically steaming from every point on him - his protruding ears, his haunting scar, his wiggling fingers.

"Easy there, sport," Shego says. "We still need that head to fit through the doors." She walks to the doors in question, presses her hand flat against a panel, and disappears, the doors clenching shut behind her.

I am alone with the man whose image I am going to save. Right now, anyone can tell he lacks the power to do it alone: his shoulders are sloped, forming a ramp to the ground, his small fists only half-curled. He needs me to encourage him, and I'm not sure if that's within Athena Smith's capacity.

Protection is one thing; I will fight off anyone who wants to hurt him with my bare hands. Obviously, too, our end game is his encouragement, and I will help bring that about. Between, I only possess the knack for stealing others' courage and leaving them to wither.

But my circuitry still warms with a deep desire to provide him some comfort. I do not know which of them put that in me, if either.

I have to try.

I steady myself and connect my brain to the Internet. Information scrolls over me in darkness, turned over and paged through with the smallest flick of my eyes. I find myself first.

"Athena," I tell Dr. Drakken, "is the Greek goddess of _wisdom_."

His face lights up, easily the brightest thing in our underground chamber. "_Wisdom_! That's even better than war! Oh, sweet jellied preserves, I'm amazing! We're amazing!"

Before I can roll my eyes, he turns and smiles at me, a tender look that fits his face much better than the wrath did. "_You're _amazing, Athena," Drakken tells me, putting his arms around me and drawing me close to all those rickety bones. His soft jawline rests atop my disheveled head.

I wait for my reward center to stop glowing as the echo of his praise off the walls dims. Either there is a flaw in my perception programming, or the rewarded sensation never fades.

If he wants to call me "bodacious" again, I won't even mind.

**~That's "bodacious" as in "awesome," not "sexy." BTW.~**


	4. First Day of School

**~Finally got this one finished! Hope you all enjoy.~**

4\. First Day of School

Your old schools were supposed to look smaller when you returned to them as an adult.

_Supposed _to.

Middleton High evidently took great glee in subverting that trope, looming even larger and more formidable than Drakken recalled it. Its courtyard sprawled wider, its grass poked up greener, its square edges cut sharper against the sky. A high-definition version of the school Drew Lipsky had eagerly fled, trembling beneath his graduation gown. The sight of it bubbled in him like vinegar on limestone and left much the same taste in his mouth as well.

Drakken's hands splayed on the console before him. It was the first bit of hesitance he'd shown thus far in Operation Unspark Possible.

He'd enrolled Athena Smith as an incoming freshman (though she was more of an incoming missile, Drakken thought), snickering to himself as his fingers tapped lies out of the keyboard. He'd ordered her a deliberately outdated plaid backpack and packed her a brown-bag lunch decorated with hearts and smiley faces, arranged for her to be picked up at the most remote place that Middleton High's buses still serviced. He'd stood in front of her this morning and drilled her on the plan - as best as he could do with that stupid trembling in his chin. Why, it seemed like only yesterday he had booted her up!

It hadn't been. It had been three weeks ago. But then, how many parents only got to spend three weeks with their child before they had to send them into the lawless wilderness that was high school?

(Not many, Drakken was betting.)

He had parked himself in an uncomfortably molded chair, fixed his wander-prone focus on the panoramic video screen that ate up almost an entire wall of this puny lair, and waited to see the day through Athena's eyes.

Not metaphorically, either. Athena's eyes also doubled as long-range telescopic lenses that beamed a clear shot of everything she saw straight back to Drakken so that he could keep tabs on her, on Kim Possible, on the situation. The "sitch," as Kim Possible herself would say. In her mind, she was allowed to make up words without being a flaky maniac, but he was not. Matter of fact, he wasn't even allowed to use "sitch" himself.

Just one of the eighty-seven-thousand reasons the child needed to be chopped down to size and quickly. She kept a surplus of confidence and charm and good fortune hugged tight to her chest, leaving other people who worked every bit as hard anemic from the lack of them.

The lenses had snapped into use as soon as Athena boarded the bus. She had been the first one on, and she'd slouched to the farthest row of seats just as she'd been instructed, her back turned against the world. One by one, other teenagers filled the seats around and in front of her. The fluid ounces of nervous sweat decreased proportionally with the increase in grade level. That had been one of Drew Lipsky's field studies in ninth-grade science, which had earned him an A-minus and a "Very amusing!" from the teacher.

There was nothing amusing about it. Especially not now.

Seniors strolled onto the bus as if it was their own personal royal carriage. Drakken half-expected them to stick their feet up on the seats in front of them, rap three times on the windows, and put in an order for honey-roasted peanuts. (It was one of his most frequent global-overlord daydreams.) Juniors and sophomores trooped on in varying degrees of eagerness and boredom and just plain sleepiness.

But freshmen had just gone from being the biggest little to the littlest big, and they knew it. Most of them followed Athena's patterns - the downcast head, lifted only enough to nod at the few other children they recognized from middle school; the chewing-on of the lips; the turned-in posture that took their flexible young backs for granted and screamed, _Please just let me survive the day!_

And then, as perfectly as if Drakken had planned it, the bus had to screech to a halt in the middle of the street in order to admit a petite girl who had apparently jogged alongside it for several minutes. She stumbled aboard in three or four chaotic movements, her cheeks flushed, her backpack hanging sideways - one strap secured, the other flapping in the air at nothing - and her hair whipped into a flurry. That cinnamon-red hair that had come to represent everything Drakken despised.

Kim Possible's gasp of, "I made it!" pinned several dozen pairs of eyes to her - eyes every bit as judgmental and ready to roll as Drakken needed them to be. He'd twiddled his fingers together and chortled right out loud.

One messy-haired, grimy-sneakered kid farther in the back had cried, "Boo-yah!"

Drakken's chortle had faded. Everything about this child was unmemorable, but he'd have known that catchphrase (one Drakken _also _wasn't allowed to use) anywhere. It was Kim Possible's vastly under-qualified sidekick, the one who had stood there and grinned like the cartoon road runner as Drakken's world had been reduced to smoke and charred rubble.

_Wait, wait, wait, _Drakken had told his fist, which was clenching of its own accord. _He's not the target. He is secondary. Wait! Wait! Wait!_

Now, as the bus rolled to a stop in front of Middleton High, Drakken was getting a clear view of how much _hadn't _changed. The sign that thought itself witty. The double doors, one of which opened with a push and the other of which required you to throw your entire body weight against it - and you always forgot which was which, meaning you either tore a wrist tendon trying to shove open the disagreeable one or toppled backward into the hall trying to ram-batter the compliant one. The pack of students, amassed on the front lawn and buzzing like a swarm of wasps. And, bulging from the left side of the building, a half-rectangular outpost without the respite of windows.

The gymnasium.

To the dark thought-closets where Drakken kept his worst memories bundled up, the words might as well have been "Open Sesame!" In an instant, in the time it took the wheezing blonde girl in front of Athena to descend one bus-step, Drakken was thrown back in time. He drew - no, bad word choice - he _pulled _himself up to as towering a height as he could manage, but he could still feel himself lying on a sticky floor, feel someone's foot in the small of his back, feel five or six sneers bearing down on him, demanding his lunch money. He heard loud, leopard-seal barks of laughter that told him he was the penguin they were hunting down. He saw himself writhing and straining with all his ninety-five-pound might to hike his head above a bar that might as well have been affixed to the roof. He'd gotten a record one chin-up in before his arms turned to damp noodles and his gym shorts deserted him in his time of need, showing the entire class - coed, of _course _\- that he still wore Spider-Man boxers.

Not until Shego was in his face, snapping her fingers and saying, "Drakken? What the heck?" did Drakken realize that it wasn't the blonde girl rasping in air in Darth Vadar fashion. It was him, and he had his hands clenched in front of him, digging into his belt while his stomach simmered.

_Stop-stop-stop-stop - STOP! _Drakken ordered himself. He would not lower himself to fear.

"Sorry, Shego," Drakken said - entirely too shakily; he'd have to fix that. "That was just some excited pantsing - I mean _panting_."

Whether or not Shego believed him was a secret she chose to keep to herself. "Well, get a grip," she said.

She looked so solid and steady standing there, her face drained of every emotion, that Drakken decided to take her up on that advice. His hand shot out, grabbed hers before he knew he was reaching for it, and gave it a squeeze.

In the next nanosecond, Shego jerked it away as if he'd come swinging at her with a chainsaw. The thought of comparing his stunted little fingers to hazardous power tools was like a gift. The glare she delivered to him, the business end of a blade itself, was not. "Not on me!" she said, and by a nervous tic he cursed himself for, Drakken was the one who ended up taking a step back.

_Check that. Every emotion _except _annoyance._

The silence in the lair hung as low and heavy as the moldering ceiling. Drakken sure could have gone for a laugh at some unsuspecting freshman's expense right about then.

Athena turned a slow circle, giving Drakken a nauseatingly clear view of her surroundings. On the final spin, she joined the teeming mass of humanity at the double doors and plunged with them into the belly of the beast.

Drakken's screen was immediately clogged with jostling shoulders, shoving hands, awkward knees, and at least one inappropriately-played elbow. He could feel his skin draining from veiny-blue to a postmortem shade of white. Athena disappeared easily into the crowd, just as she was meant to this first day. Yet every now and then she swiveled and granted him a peak at his freshman foe.

Kim Possible struggled her way through the swarm with the grace and determination of a grade-A swimmer, her face set and hard like a watch crystal. Anyone, however, could testify to the vulnerability of crystal - antiques dealers, jewelers, insurance salesmen, anyone.

_I'll break her before the semester is up, _Drakken decided. His fingers twiddled more and more rapidly, kindling an itchy fire in his chest.

When Athena reached the door of her first-period classroom, she sent one last look back at the crowd. A girl approached Kim Possible from the other end of the hall, parting the proverbial waters to get to her. Several inches taller than Kim Possible, she wore a too-snug shirt and too-loose earrings and a smile Drakken had never understood - the kind of smile that promised warmth at the edges but was cold and crunchy inside, like the microwave stew they'd served in prison. Her smooth tanned hands came out and rested chummily on Kim's arm. The gesture seemed to freeze competent, brazen Kim Possible in place.

Drakken felt himself break into a cheek-scrunching grin.

Juicy as it was, though, Athena couldn't very well stand around lollygagging in the doorway on her first day. She melted inside with the rest of the mob and found a seat as far away as she could get from a bulldozer-shaped teacher with a drill-sergeant buzz cut, his desk sporting a contradictory picture of a fluffy cat framed in pink hearts. When he thumped a skinny handbook down on her desk, she flinched just as she'd been taught, and she did it so well that Drakken joined her.

"Listen up, people!" the teacher said, his voice roaring over the room like a tornado siren. "I'm sure some of you think that just because this is study hall, that means you are free to do whatever your twisted little hearts desire! Well, I'm here to tell you that is NOT the case! 'Study' hall means 'study' hall, not 'goof-off' hall, not 'text' hall, not 'gossip' hall. And _certainly _not 'cow-wrangling' hall, no matter what last year's graduates may have told you! Do not make the same mistakes. . ."

Athena dropped her gaze to her handbook, and for the next three-and-a-quarter minutes, all Drakken saw were letters and punctuation marks, arranged into rules, bending and swaying in front of him the more he tried to level them out. The muscle under his left eye was just beginning to twitch when the door banged open again.

Every student in the room swiveled to stare at the redheaded late arrival. She'd grown a little bit since the day she watched Drakken get hauled off to do hard time, though she still fit in the doorway with ample space on all sides. She'd gotten her braces off, too. Her power was growing. It needed to be stopped.

Well, granted, right now - it looked pretty stopped. Kim Possible still held her head high, but her neck cringed. It was the first insecure thing Drakken had seen her do. It flowed over all five of his senses like hot chocolate and Bing Crosby music and expensive silk all at the same time.

"You're late," the teacher - whose name Drakken hadn't caught - barked. His eyes spiked into Kim Possible's.

Drakken pounded both fists against his thighs and whooped for joy. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Shego smiling, too, and there was nothing prison-stewy, nothing lukewarm about it. It was cold and delicious ice cream.

And he wasn't going to be the one stuck with brain freeze this time.

She knew what he knew - only because he had briefed her on it last night, though, Drakken was sure. Today was all about patience. It was about laying low (lying low?) and discovering the thin places in Kim Possible's designer-brand armor that they could poke through.

To be honest, Drakken could see a few hairline fractures surfacing already.

Drakken felt a guffaw tingling his tonsils as he held it in. He didn't have to, he knew. There was no way Kim Possible could hear him, but for some reason he wanted to match Shego's clean, smooth, ice-creamy face.

"And just who might you be? Besides _late_?" The words blasted at Kim Possible like laser cannons. Drakken decided he liked this guy.

If Kim Possible's shoulders had pulled up any higher, they would have met over her head. "Kim Possible." She said it loudly enough to carry to Athena's corner in the back of the room, but the faltering made it sound like a whisper. She was human! She was mortal!

Exhilaration leaped in Drakken's stomach.

"Possible, Possible, Possible." Lieutenant Major Teacher pawed through the papers on his desk, as if he had never heard of her before in his life. "Ah, yes. Here you are. Take a seat." He focused his pellety little eyes on Kim Possible and wafted a hand across four rows of students who clearly were _not _about to fall at her feet and worship her. In fact, from Drakken's vantage point, they appeared to be barely containing guffaws themselves. Messy Hair gave her a sympathetic cringe, but that was all.

Still holding her shoulders erect, Kim Possible dropped neatly into a desk in the first row and put up a palm to receive her handbook and bent herself over it in perfect-student silence. But Athena could still see, and therefore Drakken could too, the utter absence of a smile on Kim Possible's cheeks - cheeks so red Drakken could almost smell them cooking. It was the moment in the climax of a cartoon where the otherworldly, havoc-wreaking monster of the week was captured and revealed to be nothing more than another person in another mask. A fake. A hoax.

Nothing to be afraid of.

Ridiculously, Drakken felt his own shoulders relax at the thought, and he frowned, hoping Shego saw neither of these events take place. What in the ever-lovin' world, as Mother would say? It couldn't be that he was _afraid _of Kim Possible. Not exactly. How could anyone be afraid of her? She was a little toothpick of a girl, still a year or two removed from Driver's Ed.

That was the thing about toothpicks, though. They were pointy. And if you didn't handle them correctly, if you got careless, they could leave your gums bleeding - one of the most repellant sensations known to mankind.

But at this point, Kim Possible didn't seem capable of cutting into _anyone's _gums. Drakken would have taken a snapshot if he'd had a camera. Would have frozen time if he'd had superpowers.

Athena snapped her gaze back to her handbook, filling Drakken's screen with rules and regulations in perfectly measured columns and perfectly stacked type. He squinted at it to see if Middleton High's code of conduct had changed any in the past twenty-eight years - obviously the dress code had slackened - but he couldn't hold the words still long enough to find out. Especially not when the boy in the seat next to Athena, another underclassman judging by the capricious crackle of his voice, muttered, "Are we _sure _that's the girl who took down that evil freak last summer?"

Referring, of course, to Professor Dementor.

Athena raised her head to check if Kim Possible had heard. Drakken couldn't tell. Her back was pressed in an unmoving 180 degrees that meant nothing to him.

Must have meant something to Shego, though, because she smiled as if she'd just won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Cayman Islands. "Oh, yeah," she said. "She so caught that."

Drakken whirled in his seat and held up his hand for a high-five. She ignored it and returned her attention to her nail file, as if it could have _possibly _been more exciting than him, leaving Drakken to smack air and celebrate alone. It knocked the wind from his sails, so to speak - winds he had spent all day whipping up just to blow them back to shore, and look how little regard she had for them!

He suddenly wished he had a better method of communicating with Athena. She would have understood exactly how it felt. He'd _programmed _her to understand.

Now if only he could program everyone else, too. . .

Athena was one of the earliest arrivals to second-period math on the opposite side of the school and, oddly, also monitored by Lieutenant Major Teacher. Came in handy to have a working GPS in your brain, Drakken reasoned with just a _peppering _of smugness. And when Kim Possible barged in three minutes after the bell, looking as if a cyclone had picked her up and carried her here, Drakken was finally satisfied knowing that was one advantage Miss Mere-Mortal Possible didn't possess.

"Possible," Lieutenant Major Teacher said, insulting her with a curt nod that sent thrills through Drakken. "Late again, I see."

"Mr. Barkin?" Kim Possible's face froze. "But - weren't you just all the way over -"

"I have my methods!" the man said in a low growl that quashed any challenge before anyone could even try it on him. A twinge of envy itched in Drakken's chest, right between his lungs, and he wasn't entirely certain why. His own voice was every bit as deep and expansive as this man's, if not more so, and the contrast between it and his more efficiently-packed body should surely unsettle the unprepared, and yet instead he was a magnet for insolence and mockery.

Maybe he needed to sign up for the Army. Or start pumping iron. Or maybe he just needed to meld said iron (atomic number 26) into attack drones that would, not so gently, persuade the public to fear the name of Dr. Drakken.

Oooh, he liked that idea! _First things first, though._

And "first things" were going rather well. Kim Possible hurried to another front-row seat as if she could outrun the cracks that had started defacing her perfection.

Drakken tucked one foot between his rear end and the hard plastic molding of the chair and bounced in his seat like he had the hiccups. She had no idea that no matter where she ran, he would be there waiting for her. Secrecy was a road Drakken hadn't traveled very often, and the light at the end of it flickered a promise even through the scrawny blackened branches he encountered at every turn.

Mr. Barkley or whatever his name was had apparently decided that Kim Possible was his new favorite student to pick on. She was, at the very least, the one he called to the board to solve three algebra problems, three strings of exponents and variables and parenthetical operations. For every other student, the atmosphere in the classroom immediately switched to half gratitude that it wasn't them and half dread on Kim Possible's behalf, pulled together like a pair of curtains.

Kim Possible took a deep breath, raised her skinny little frame from her seat, and marched it to the chalkboard. The many recipes for failure brought seeps of saliva to Drakken's lips. He grabbed the first piece of paper he could find and took a pencil to it, crossing the little legs on the Xs to form that lovely box, miniaturizing exponents to fit them in the upper right corner, attaching one horizontal line to one vertical so it miraculously became a plus sign.

_First, outer, inner, last. _

The words ran through Drakken's memory like a song you couldn't get out of your head. He dashed parentheses down on the paper and began to work the problems himself.

Kim Possible's response was delightfully typical of an unsophisticated adolescent. Drakken glanced up from cross-multiplying to see a crack physically form on her forehead. Okay, it wasn't a _crack _\- just a pucker. But it meant she couldn't figure out where to go first, and that made it his new favorite thing. Watching it smooth as she finally remembered the FOIL method and went to work made his ego muscles cramp.

If egos had muscles. Drakken couldn't be sure, but his sure felt like it had just received a tetanus booster.

It didn't last long, though. Well, actually, it _did_, and that was the part that lit up his hope. Kim Possible took five-point-seven minutes to solve each problem. Drakken had worked each out in two-point-six.

So, in a sense, he was the one who had just FOILed her. _Ah, turnabout truly is fair play!_

Shego glanced up from her nail file long enough to say, "What are you giggling about?"

Drakken lashed a glare her direction, even though she'd already gone back to studying her gloves. "That _manly chortle _you heard, Shego, was because I solved the problems sooner than our Little Miss Straight-A did!"

Shego inched her chair closer to his, tearing the earth floor and releasing the scent of soil and mold. "Yeah, but she got it right."

Drakken slammed both hands onto the console and scoured his paper for errors. He found none and was entirely within his rights to shoot back, "So did _I_!"

"Uh, no. It's two-x-squared plus four-x. You've got four-x-squared plus two-x."

_Oh, doodlebugs._

"A minor glitch!" Drakken sang out, stuffing the paper behind his back. "Copy-paste error. It was fine in my head!"

His pitch peaked, too defensive, sounding like a fib. Except it wasn't. It also wasn't anything new. The numbers came together beautifully in his head - it was only when he tried to transfer them to paper that something betrayed him and gave way. Not every time, but often enough that he sometimes wished he could rip open his brain (painlessly!) and show everyone its fine condition.

Kim Possible laid the chalk to rest in its little nook and swished back to her seat. Drakken saw the relief pass across her face and immediately be transmuted into that vexatious haughtiness he remembered so well. She thought she was "all that" again.

But she _wasn't_.

Third and fourth periods also unfolded under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Major Teacher. Kim Possible continued to stare at him in confusion, unable to piece together that there _had _to be some type of cloning machine locked inside the teachers' lounge - maybe even in _place _of the teachers' lounge. Drakken stuck that onto a rear burner, as the saying went, and vowed to come back for it later, once this mission had succeeded.

Lunch came afterward. Athena, just as Drakken had instructed her, sat alone and picked at the Sloppy Joe he'd sent with her, chopping it with her fork and pushing the scraps around and around on her plate, showcasing all the symptoms of poor self-esteem. Kim Possible, her messy-haired friend, and a cluster of other frightened freshmen took a table in the back and nervously poked at their questionable hot lunches, the flavor of which Drakken remembered in the back of his throat. Juniors and seniors and even sophomores stayed away as if they had been hit with a restraining order.

With one exception. The tanned girl in the tightly-wrapped shirt stopped by their table to drop a hand on Kim Possible's shoulder and say a few words to her. Even Athena couldn't make out what she was saying exactly - only that she was saying it with a smile like wild honey, flowing and smooth and sweet and protected by thousands of stingers.

The transmission beams in Athena's eyes automatically blacked out when she entered the girls' locker room before gym. That had been Shego's suggestion, but Drakken had agreed with readiness - and a blush he'd hoped she hadn't picked up on. Even though he was prepared to lose visual contact, he still ended up throwing glances to all corners of the lair to convince his overly-anxious body he _hadn't _just been blinded.

Within five seconds, he had identified at least that many varieties of fungi.

Shudder. Drakken whipped back to the screen. Even dark with only faint traces of nervous chatter coming through, it was preferable to examining his current surroundings.

Athena idled during laps and kept pace with the middling runners. It had to be killing her, Drakken thought, considering she could have rocketed around the room in less time than it would take most of them to tie their shoelaces. He could relate. Every time he had to divert attention from himself, he felt like he'd just taken a swig of the planet's fizziest soda and had only gotten it halfway down.

Kim Possible, of course, led the pack, her head held high, hair snapping side to side at her waist, daring anyone to try to for second place. Once again, she believed herself invincible. Messy Hair heaved for breath as he brought up the rear, his T-shirt suction-cupped to his back with sweat. Drakken made every effort to avoid looking at him; it put a roaring ache right between his temples.

As the freshman class "cooled down" with stretches against the bleachers, a group of senior boys entered, half of them bigger than Drakken, prowling around the court like a pack of leopards. The thought volleyed around inside him, knocking into his sternum in its quest to get _out-out-out_. Drakken clenched his hands in his lap so they wouldn't shake, but he was pretty sure Shego could _hear _the tremor in his wrists.

_Focus._

Drakken ignored the fizzle in his throat - as much as such things could go ignored - and followed Kim Possible's yearning gaze to the tummy-baring girls who followed in the leopards' wake, clutching fluffy balls of purple-and-white ticker tape. What _were _those called, anyway?

It was moot. They were cheerleaders. Miss Tan and Snooty was among them. And Kim Possible bounced her perky way up to them as soon as there was a break in their conversation.

"Hi, guys," she said. "So - um - when do you hold cheerleader tryouts?"

Behind Miss T-and-S, the other cheerleaders exchanged pitying looks. "Kim? Has no one told you yet?" Miss T-and-S herself said. "Freshmen aren't allowed to try out." She gave a processed-sugar shrug, still wearing the simpering smile that Drakken was convinced must have been tattooed to her face. "School policy."

Kim Possible gaped at them, her stare as dead and glassy as that of a fish floating upside-down in the bowl. That was the moment when Drakken expected her to explode into shards, every privileged bit of herself - all over the high school gymnasium, because what better place to come unglued? He wanted to harvest all the pieces and bury them in the smoking remains of his island lair.

Well, okay, after over a year, they probably weren't smoking anymore. Might have even been bulldozed away so that no one could tell anything had ever stood there.

Sniff.

And so Drakken began to amend his wish. He wanted to stake a marker right here in this very spot, commemorating the place where Kim Possible learned that she was but a patch of fabric on the crazy quilt of life. A trifling little slip of a human who did not have the control she had presumed to have over the world.

_Oh, don't worry, Kim Possible, _Drakken thought, his chest rumbling as he chuckled. _I'll take good care of it for you._

He scribbled "cheerleading" onto his list of (heh) Possible Weaknesses and absently flipped the paper over. Some old scrap of mail offering him a great deal on his life insurance policy, ensuring his loved ones would be well-provided-for should he happen to blunder his way into a lion's den one day.

_Even _they _expect me to fail._ Drakken clenched his fists. _Well, won't they be surprised when I conquer the world? We'll see what _that _does to their premiums!_

Boys and girls split up to return to the locker rooms, and the screen tunneled into blackness again. Drakken could nevertheless still hear someone's trudging, depressed walk behind Athena. He imagined it to be Kim Possible. Had to be Kim Possible. Who else _could _it be?

Excitement attacked Drakken, making it impossible to stay in his seat or for his spine to remain in its usual devious hunch. He exploded from his chair. The five-foot-ten he achieved if one rounded by the rules nearly caught the ceiling, but the events of the last ten minutes had insulated his nerves. It would take nothing short of a lightning strike to touch them now.

Drakken shaped his hands into pistols, firing his index fingers in Shego's direction seven times each, never stopping to reload. "Pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew!" he cried. "Pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew!"

Shego rolled her eyes - eyes that could no longer moonlight as the dictionary illustration for "underwhelmed." Drakken even thought he saw a grin flicker at the corners of her mouth.

And then, right before last period, lightning struck.

Athena spun her locker combination so forlornly that no one would ever have guessed she could have lasered the lock open and had just retrieved her biology book when the locker door was slapped shut again by a hand with fingernails like miniature mirrors. She and Drakken turned to stare at a trio of girls who towered over Athena and regarded her with eyes that slid back and forth to each other as if to double-check that they were all in agreement that Athena belonged in Kingdom Fungi herself.

All three pairs of eyes were agleam. Merciless. It was the same glitter Drakken saw on his own reflection every day, yet somehow it was still alien to him. These girls already had power - they wore it in the fresh creases in their jeans and the golden squiggles running through their hair and the cosmetic perfection of their faces. Any more and they'd blow a fuse, but here they came after Athena anyway.

Why? Did they sense something in her? More power in her little finger than in their entire bodies? Drakken's self-esteem hoped so, but he could almost hear Shego reminding him that the long-term plan depended on no one being able to sense that. More likely, they'd just seen whatever it was every high-school bully had seen in Drew Lipsky twenty-plus years ago.

"Hey, loser," said the girl with the mirror-nails.

Drakken caught the acrid humor in the girl's voice and turned to powder. Shego was already snorting and saying, "Oh, how original," but Drakken couldn't move for fear of scattering in the breeze. He wanted to break off the transmission, clamp his hands over his ears and rock, burrow even farther underground than he already was. Anything to keep him from this scene he would soon be obligated to witness.

Athena peered at the girls from beneath her hair. It strung over her face like a half-finished piece of knitting. One of the other girls, her eyelids dusted with reddish-brown Martian dust, tweaked a strand of it. "You know, they make these things called showers," she said.

_Nggggh_! If only Drakken was able to leap through the screen - he would knock those girls straight on their sorry little behinds. But he couldn't.

Not without wrecking the scheme.

(But let the record show he was absolutely _capable _of doing it!)

"I know," Athena said in a scraped-up whisper.

"So you were _trying _for the grunge look," the girl with the mini-mirrors said. She turned to her two friends, who supported her with nods that Drakken was immediately suspicious of. "Well, next time just know that you can get your own clothes. You don't _have _to wear Mommy's hand-me-downs, even if she asks you to."

Athena glanced down at the chunky shirt with its blocky stripes of black and red and blue and the velveteen leggings that stopped several inches short of her calves. "No, these are mine. I thought they were stylish."

Drakken shoved his teeth into his knuckle, almost puncturing the glove between them.

"Ohmigosh, really?" said the third girl, the one with earrings stuffed so tightly into her earlobes that her skin seemed to exudate diamonds. "Because you look like you just stepped off a runway. Twenty years ago."

Martian Eyelids flicked her hand. "Poor thing. She must not have known that episode of _The Style File _was a rerun."

"How could she not? It was on VHS!" exclaimed Diamond Skin.

The air around Drakken thinned and he had to gasp for it, suddenly sure that someone had swapped the oxygen in the room for nitrous oxide, and any second he would keel over dead. Only if that had happened, he'd be a mess of hysterical laughter on the floor, and he was not, not by a long shot. Instead, it was those girls who kept laughing - and laughing - and laughing - with no way to turn them off. Drakken gripped the console and fought back the urge to throw up all over his lovely buttons and switches.

Diamond Skin stepped closer and poked a finger at Athena's dirt-smudged cheek. "But here's a tip for you, hon. Foundation and zit cream are _always _in style. You can't go wrong with them. So - how about you try wearing some tomorrow?"

Saline appeared in Athena's eyes. Drakken was wheezing, one hand crimped in the front of his lab coat. She shouldn't have been crying yet. It wasn't in the plan to cry until _after _school, when he was ready for it and when it was nothing more than bait for Kim Possible.

Where, oh where, was that military teacher when you needed him?

A bell rang - _thank the heavens_. The unholy trinity hoisted their own backpacks and bolted in three different directions. Once they were gone, Athena curled behind the last locker in the bank and slid down its chipped white paint job. She let out a long, wobbling sigh, and all of Drakken's nerves turned to defibrillators.

After that, last-period science was completely uneventful. Athena slunk in just as the warning bell went off, close enough to late to earn a glare but nothing else from Military Teacher. She kept herself huddled in the back of the room and paged through the drawings of dissected frogs the same way Shego would flip through her magazines. When the students were finally released and came pouring out of their classrooms, Athena grabbed her cell phone from her pocket and headed around to the side of the building, where she would proceed to dump her backpack across the asphalt and make a teary phone call to Shego.

Drakken breathed deeply and immediately wished he hadn't. Mold and moss and mushrooms and musk rose up to greet him. If he had been back in a decent lair - say, _a certain haunted-island _one that he had loved _very much _\- he would have found those organisms fascinating. He'd have retrieved samples of them and stuck them between microscope slides of his own invention, labeled them, dated them (as in _written the date_, not _taken them out for dinner_) all before Shego could even clock into work at nine A.M.

But here - _living _inside them, knowing they might be crawling on his bed and the underside of his bathroom sink and they weren't here by his invitation. . . it was degrading. Also compromised the air. No wonder his breath had failed him at so many points today. He was living off the fumes of everything he'd lost.

Drakken punched his chin out even farther than usual. Just wait until he'd returned the favor to Kim Possible. Just wait until _she _was the one choking on laughing gas and mold and ruin.

The world would be Drakken's for the taking, and then he would - pardon the expression - breathe easy at last.


	5. Status report 1-point-6

_Mission report 1.6_

_Day of Observation completed. Initiating first contact._

I tug my backpack zipper halfway open before the bell even dismisses us. As soon as it does, I calculate the exit Kim Possible is most likely to take and bolt for it, putting in greater speed than I used in gym class, my scuffed sneakers throwing gravel up behind me. The sky has turned a drizzly, metallic gray, the same color as my insides.

There is a corner ahead. Maybe three steps away. One - I inch my feet closer together. Two - still closer. And on three, I cross my right foot into the path of my left so that my left toes catch on the back of my right heel. I fall hard, feeling the gravel against my palms as an achy, bumping pressure rather than the searing bite my human creators would feel. As I hoped, my backpack shifts sideways and empties into the parking lot. My Algebra I textbook lands spine up in a puddle that quickly soaks its pages.

I make what I have been instructed must be a half-hearted attempt to scramble after my things, and I only manage to grab my student schedule. I tuck it under my arm, where it crinkles against my side. With a groan, I press against the wall and drop to the sidewalk. My color-block shirt scrapes against the painted stone on the way down - the only thing I have felt so far that might be as hard as I am.

Without even needing to picture him, my father's grinning face invades my mind, urges me to keep going.

I am grateful for the bullies and their comments. They prove I seem authentic. They also make it easier to create my frown, to gather my tears. The liquid slides off my face, the expulsion of it rattling my body until my circuitry strains, and I end up hunched into a ball, one arm slung across my knees, sobbing my stomach in and out.

It is time for Operation Pity Party. Shego was the one who named it that. Drakken protested, his lip pooched out, that such a name made light of everything I was surely going to go through on my first day of high school. I laughed, assured him that I only _look _like a teenage girl. Inside, I am all metal and will and power.

I fish my cell phone from my pocket. It is the kind that flips open and snaps shut - hopelessly out of date, according to Shego, which will add to my dorky persona.

There is only one number in its banks. HOME.

I punch the Call button.

Somewhere in that dark, narrow lair that drips with foul smells, Shego's cell phone, much more up-to-date than mine, rings. A moment later, she answers, speaking through a vocal distorter that turns her voice into something older, warmer, softer. She is a good enough actress to fake the kindness, but Kim Possible has heard Shego talk before; she would recognize her voice. None of us were willing to take that risk.

"Athena! I wasn't expecting to hear from you so soon! Is everything okay?" The sound of the gentle words from Shego's sharp mouth make me want to laugh, but there will be time for that later, after I have ground out Kim Possible's spark.

I hear someone's footsteps approaching the corner. Light, graceful footsteps, still determined to bounce even after the day we have all endured. Perfect timing.

"I just had the worst first day of school _ever_, Mom!" I sob. "They only give you, like, five seconds to get from one classroom to the next, even if it's all the way across the stupid building. There was nobody to sit with at lunch. A bunch of girls found me before last period and called me a loser. And I _just now _dumped my backpack all over the place trying to get my phone out!"

The footsteps break into a run, and then they leave the ground entirely as Kim Possible cartwheels around the corner. I stare at her with the amazement she expects. Balancing on one hand, she sweeps up my books; switching hands, she snags my purple folder with the duck where I have crushed all of my important papers. She lands at my feet, holds out her loot, and smiles - a smile filled not with coldness, but with self-sustaining warmth. She stands there and offers me my things because it is the only way she herself can stay upright.

"Hang on, Mom!" I gasp into the phone. "Someone's here. I think she's gonna help."

Shego's muffled laughter is the last thing I hear before I hang up and stare into the eyes of my enemy.

Green eyes, like Shego's, only a lighter tint and without Shego's violence behind them; they sag at the corners when they see me. Even from where I'm sitting, I can tell that I am taller than this girl by several inches, and that she would be fashion-model-skinny if not for the tight knots of muscle in her limbs. Hair the red of rust flows silken and clean down to her tiny waist, draping a round face that has just begun to mature, freckles dissipating into fair skin. On her, the transition looks much less awkward than it does on her golden-haired friend or many of the other freshmen.

She is, just as Drakken described her, infuriatingly beautiful and poised, though I know she is nothing next to Shego. I have acquired my target.

"Rough day, huh?" Kim Possible says.

I wipe my cheek with a mud-splattered palm, purposefully leaving a streak of dirt in the place most likely to draw attention to the blemishes Drakken designed for me. "You could say that."

"Were you late to all your classes, too?"

"Just one. Biology 102." This is not true, but Kim Possible isn't in Biology 102, so it doesn't matter. "I got there right as the bell was ringing, which wouldn't have been _so _bad, but then I slipped on something and fell smack on my butt in front of everyone."

Kim Possible tilts her head, looks at me, at the tears and the dirt I am using as bait. "I'm SO sorry that happened to you," she says. "Mega-awful."

I bury my face in my hands and don't peek between the fingers. Shego says Drakken peeks all the time, and according to her, it makes him look childish and petulant without fail. So I don't look up again until a hand touches my shoulder. Unlike Shego's plasma, the heat from this hand is comfortable, and unlike Drakken's reckless enthusiasm, these fingers curl cautiously on my shoulder as if she is trying to not scare me away.

"I'm Kim, by the way. Kim Possible."

I let myself smile and then I give her a reason for it. "I already knew that. Recognized you from your picture on the news. Aren't you the one who took down that creepy little Professor Dementor?" I know nothing about Professor Dementor other than the fact that my father hates him almost as much as he hates Kim Possible. Maybe he will send me after Dementor for my next mission, once I have neutralized her.

"Oh. Yeah." Kim Possible shrugs, which I recognize from my studies on projecting modesty. On her, though, the gesture seems to ripple, as if it knows it deserves attention. "That's me. What's your name?"

"Athena," I say. "Athena Smith. I know - strange, isn't it?"

"No way!" Kim Possible cuts me off sooner than I would have figured. "I mean, I guess it's a _tiny _bit strange, but it's pretty, too."

"Thanks." I stand up and hook my eyes to her green, weedy ones. "My parents didn't want me disappearing into a sea of Smiths, you know?"

Kim Possible dumps my books into my backpack and zips it shut, unaware that by doing it, she already serves my father. "Makes total sense," she says.

And I have already started reeling her in.

She straightens, and her lips hesitate for an interval so brief none of her fellow humans could detect it. "Um, actually, my friend Ron and I were going to go to Bueno Nacho and celebrate surviving today. You could come with if you want," Kim says at last.

I stare at her like I can't believe my good luck, even though I can. Drakken's predictions are all coming true. "You mean it?" I say.

"Absolutely." Kim Possible nods to the phone still clenched in my hand. "If it's okay with your mom. Do you need to call her back?"

"Oh, I can just text her." I shake my head so that she can't miss the pathetic state of my hair, and with what I have measured and checked to be the perfect amount of self-deprecation add, "Believe it or not, I _can _text on this thing. I just have to press all the little number keys until the right letter comes up. Huge pain."

Kim Possible's nose wrinkles, her expression disgusted but aimed solely at my phone. "Oh, yeah. I remember my first cellie. With the battery that I think weighed two pounds. Listen, do you take the bus?"

I nod.

"Spankin'. I'm gonna go tell Ron you're coming, and we'll meet you on the bus, okay?"

I nod again. "Thanks, Kim. Thanks a ton. You're so nice. This – this really means a lot to me."

It's the first thing I've said to her that isn't a lie.

Kim Possible gives my hand one last squeeze and flashes me a smile so sincere that the reward center in my brain lights up. Twice as brightly as it's supposed to.

And then she is gone, around the corner with a skip in her step and no idea whom she has just invited into her life.

Bueno Nacho sits at the corner of a busy intersection, facing away from Middleton High, for which I am glad. I have had enough of that building for one day. As we walk in, I take in a roof shaped like a Mexican hat - a _sombrero_, my databases tell me - and the air is both soft and sharp, not soggy against my meshed skin like it is in Drakken's lair.

On the bus ride here, Kim Possible introduced me to her best friend and partner in crime fighting, the boy who barely fills the clothes he wears. He flashes me a brilliant, guileless smile, the way my father's might look if it didn't have the pain twisting it. Drakken warned me about this boy, too, though he just called him "the buffoon," never had a name for him. Over the back of his seat, he gave me one - Ron Stoppable.

It was hard to classify such a tender-faced boy as an enemy. But Drakken's words persist in my mind - _Don't take your eyes off that child. He may look like a ridiculous nitwit who can't keep his pants up - and, usually, he is. But he will do _any_thing for Kim Possible. And it's not out of the question for him to suddenly develop competence when you're not looking!_

I keep Drakken's brokenness in my chest, alive and beating, where my heart would be if he had given me one.

Now I stand at a counter at the front of a long line, making myself small while Ron orders one of nearly everything on the menu and Kim rolls her eyes at him - eyes that have known him and his friendship forever.

I force myself not to clench my teeth, not to give myself away. My father has no one like that in his life. He never has. Drakken has told me some of the stories of what he endured in his childhood, things that make the insults I heard two hours ago shrink into nothingness.

"Athena?" Ron whips his scrawny body toward me. He has more freckles than Kim, darker ones distributed haphazardly across his face, bright and lively. "What'll you have?"

"Oh. Um. No. I mean, nothing." I take a step backward and look down at the toes of my sneakers, avoiding the brand name on the side. The brand that was last popular around the time Shego was born. "I'm on a diet."

"What?" Ron says.

Kim Possible's eyebrows pop up, and I can see her pick up this information and store it away. I will hear about this again, I know, but for now she simply frowns and reaches for her backpack. It unzips, the brushed-leather texture of a purse peeking through. "Okay - well, what do you want to drink? I can spring for a diet cola."

I imagine it sizzling against my circuits, eating through me, melting me, and it takes everything I am not to shudder. "Just water will be fine," I say.

It _will _be fine, as long as I don't ingest it. I will have to distract them from the fact that I am not drinking it, but that will be less suspicious than turning down the offer of a calorie-free drink.

A few minutes later we collect our food and drinks, and Ron leads the way to a table against the west wall. Squeezed into a booth beside Kim, I watch the raindrops pelt the window and listen to the distant roar of thunder. It sounds unhappy; it sounds like my father's groans.

"So - Athena? You new in town?" Kim asks.

I nod.

"Where'd you move from?" Ron says.

"The Arctic," I say, because it is as close to the truth as I can give her.

"Seriously?" Kim says.

"Yeah," I say. "My dad was stuck up there. Dead-end job. Had a contract. Couldn't get out of it until -" I stop myself before I say _a few weeks ago_. That will coordinate with Drakken's escape from a prison - in the Arctic - and she might put it together. "- the end of last school year. So I know nobody _here_. And my dad's still kind of a wreck."

I can almost hear Shego snort in agreement.

"Aw, man," Kim says. "I'm so sorry."

_You should be, _I think. _You did it to him._

"At least it's warmer here," I say with a light laugh. "And, trust me, my dad would be doing handsprings if he found out I'd made friends with Kim Possible on the first day."

Not a lie.

Ron begins to laugh too, giggles fizzing from him like the bubbles from the soda machine. "Sorry," he says. "I was just trying to picture my dad doing handsprings. He's an actuary. Whatever that is, I don't think he's hand-sprung a day in his life. Her nana has, though."

My processor speeds up. Drakken never mentioned a nana. "Really?" I say.

"Yeah. She used to be part of some kind of elite protection squad down in Florida," Kim Possible says. "She's retired now, of course. Moved up here last year to be closer to us."

I lean forward, planting my elbows on the tacky tabletop. "So - the crime-fighting thing runs in the family?"

"I guess you could say that." Kim Possible stabs her fork into her salad and lifts a hunk.

Ron looks at me, his mouth overflowing with lettuce and cheese. "Are you sure you don't want one of these?" he says, holding out the burrito he has just unwrapped.

I am _very _sure.

"Totally," I say. I carefully measure out the curl to my top lip - if it goes too high, I will look like the girls in the hall before last period, and their sympathy will be lost. "Thanks anyway."

"Come on, Athena." Kim Possible's expression is magnanimous. I have never seen such concern on a human face before.

The word _underestimated _flickers briefly in my head and then disappears, running down the glass with the raindrops.

"Oh, don't worry. I'll have something when I get home," I say, bending toward my straw and pantomiming a sip. "I just SO don't do fast food."

Kim Possible's brow relaxes. Relief seeps off her in waves, and I can identify them all. She has already adopted me as her responsibility. She has adopted the entire world as her responsibility. The burden is heavy and of her own choosing; when I strike, she will fall, and the load will flatten her for me.

"Sheesh. Girls get way too uptight about stuff like that," Ron says. Two spots flush on his cheeks and fan outward until even the bridge of his nose is pink. It is exactly how Drakken blushes when Shego taunts him. "I mean, you know, _some _girls. Not all girls. Ya know what? I'll just stop talking now."

Something inside me wants to soften. Every other part of me screams against it.

"Well, it's hard not to." I draw my knees up in front of me, underneath the table, looking at Kim. "When there are girls like _you _around."

Kim frowns again. "Girls like _me_? What do you mean?"

"Oh, come on. Girls without nightmare wardrobes, or zits, or -" I page through the issue of _Seventeen _I have open in my mind - "or split ends."

"Athena, look at me."

Kim Possible's voice is so stern that I mistake it for an order from Shego. Obey it. Her face tugs downward into a frown. "You're really pretty," she says.

"Well, you're really nice," I say. "But, no, I'm not."

"Yes, you _are_." Kim Possible catches hold of my arm. "I _mean _that. But you know, if you can't see it yet, we could maybe - we could maybe do a few things to make the most of how you look."

"And by 'we,' she means 'Kim,'" Ron adds. He looks rather pale across the table, fingers fidgeting as he unwraps his third burrito.

I rest my forehead against the window. The clouds have stopped spitting out rain, and a hint of sun struggles through them. Trapped underground, Drakken will never know the difference.

"Really? You would do that? _Can _you even do that?" I let go of a sigh, both satisfied and offended by how vulnerable I sound.

"Um, have you not heard I can do anything?" she says. "And you're giving me a lot to work with. Honestly. A little foundation, some lipstick, maybe a touch of eyeshadow - you'll be amazing." Kim pulls back and taps her fingernails against the table. "That is - if it's okay with your mom."

"Oh, my mom's totally fine with me wearing makeup," I tell her. "I just never got up the nerve to ask her to show me how it goes on!" Helplessly, I hold out the hands that I could wrap around Kim Possible's throat and snap her windpipe underneath.

"Well, then, congrats, Athena," Kim Possible says. The shaft of sunlight that flits across our table makes her hair glow red-gold and the grease glisten on top of Ron's burrito. "You just won yourself a makeover."

Her eyes are so close that my own bedraggled reflection gleams in them. I peek at it, knowing this is one of the last times I will ever see it. I see something else in her eyes, too - something that regards me as something other than a responsibility. Or a fashion challenge.

By the time we walk back to their block and Ron heads to his own house across the street, I still can't figure out what it was in there.

The sight of Kim Possible's house chases away all other thoughts anyway. It sits at the crest of a hill like a shrine to my namesake, longer than it is tall, the roof flat and shingled. The weak sunlight hits the windows on every plane of the house, from the practical rectangular ones, to the ones oval and modern, to the ones etched in elegant diamond shapes, and it comes back magnified.

I follow her up a driveway lined with holly bushes, their snarled branches clipped back. I wipe my feet on a tan mat with WELCOME painted on it in curlicue strokes, atop a slab of granite that has never known mold. I watch her ring the doorbell that winks sideways at us as it chimes.

And I seethe.

I see Drakken thrashing around in his lair as I walk across symmetrical, spotless tile. I watch him pace back and forth, cringing to avoid the ceiling barely bigger than he is, as I take in the light brown cabinets positioned on the kitchen walls, the tasteful crop of solid yellow wallpaper beneath them. I hear the echoes of his words bouncing vacantly off the lair's walls as Kim Possible walks up to a smiling, feathery woman and gives her a kiss on the cheek.

"How was your first day, Kimmy?" the woman asks. Her bob glows vermillion in the new sun.

Kim Possible shrugs. "Could have been better," she admits. "But, hey, I managed to make a new friend. Mom, this is Athena Smith. She's new in town."

"How wonderful to meet you, Athena," Kim's mom says. I stick out my hand, and she takes it in a lock-firm grip that both does and doesn't surprise me. "Make yourself right at home. Hands off the surgical instruments, though."

Her mother is a brain surgeon. Her father, whom _my _father could barely talk about, is a rocket scientist. But I need to pretend I don't know this until she tells me. Then when she does, that I don't care.

Kim Possible leads me up a wide, straight staircase to the second story. The stairs, padded with velvety carpet the same color as Drakken's favorite chocolate, hush my footsteps.

The feeling I get when we ascend into Kim Possible's bedroom rubs against me like a wire gone askew inside my torso.

"Well, here we are." Silken sheets give beneath her as Kim sinks onto her bed. It wouldn't fit in the lair, at least not if we wanted to be able to still move around. "Makeover central."

I can't keep my mouth shut any longer. "Your house is _beautiful_," I breathe. A real teenage girl would say it. A real teenage girl might even feel the envy scratching at me.

"This? Oh, it's no big." Kim Possible waves a hand.

And I freeze inside. I was right. Drakken was right. She takes this for granted.

I want to turn on her now, throw her to the ground and plant my foot in her chest. I want to demand to know if she remembers my father, why he is somehow outside the boundaries of the compassion I now have seen she has.

But I remember the righteous set of her jaw when I mentioned Dementor. If she remembers my father, she will have nothing but contempt for him. And if she knows I came from him, she won't let me walk across her plush carpet or breathe in the clean air.

Kim Possible pops up from her bedspread, unable, like Drakken, to stay at rest for long. "All right. Makeover time!"

Her words don't come out in the shallow squeal I expected.

Kim walks to the wide, pristine, off-white expanse of wall across from her bed. Only its gilded handles mark it as a closet entrance. She gives one of them a tug, and half the room disappears as doors part, drawers slip open, and panels unfold with every type of cosmetic known to the search engine in my mind. Enough clothes slide into place along the skinny railing that my processing unit almost believes I'm standing in Club Banana, which Shego's influence on my database tells me is the hottest, freshest place to buy clothing in all of Middleton. And the most expensive.

My eyes catch on only one outfit, though, one I recognize from online news articles. A black top, clipped off before the point where it should stop, over a pair of slim khaki pants with a mink-brown belt looped around the waist, dangling down to the hip pockets.

I take a step backward and rearrange my face into my best replica of wonder. I need to come across as in awe. And, in a sense, I am - in awe that something can be this beautiful and this ugly all at the same time. "I've seen you wear that outfit in the paper!" I say. "That's your mission outfit, isn't it?"

_The one you wore when you destroyed my father's world?_ Blackness simmers in my throat, and I choke it back. I can't let it show.

It must not, because Kim Possible smiles at me, flinging trust around as if she has plenty stored up to give, as if loyalty cuts only the bad guys. "That's the one. I guess it gets a little cartoony, wearing the same outfit every time, but hey." She shrugs. "If something works, I like to stick with it."

"I understand," I lie.

A mirror stands in front of me, half the size of the room's square windows and twice as shiny, and I can see every deficiency, every blemish painted onto my face. The area that has come to life in front of me is scarcely smaller than Drakken's robotics lab, and it has the same purpose, I realize. It is here that Kim Possible schemes, believes herself to be in control.

Only with great effort do I manage to step into it.

Kim Possible puts her hands on my shoulders and pushes me onto a chair with a pillow for a seat. It makes no difference to me - I am sitting on steel and synthetics no matter what - but I can almost feel Drakken's envy stinging at the backs of my eyes. With his delicate bones and knobby joints and thin, stringy muscles, he needs a cushion when he sits. Of course, there is no such luxury in the cavern where he now lives.

I stare at my lap. "I don't know if I'm up for it."

"Up for what?" Kim Possible says. A bottle of liquid clinks in her grip, and she scoots it toward me.

"Up for pretending to be pretty."

"Athena!" Kim Possible says. She guides my hair away from my face and to the center of my back, then turns to me and skims her thumbs across my cheekbones. "You're not going to 'pretend' ANYthing. What we're doing is finding your REAL prettiness and figuring out how to accentuate it."

She gives my hand a squeeze, the same way Drakken did this morning before he sent me to the bus stop. For a moment, I wonder how the two kindest people I have known are enemies. "We'll start with a little cleanser. It works wonders." Kim Possible leans toward me, lowers her voice in conspiracy. "Believe it or not, cool girls can get zits, too."

Her sarcasm is softer than Shego's, and I find myself smiling at her. It is the thing to do.

But it becomes less and less forced as Kim Possible shakes some of the liquid onto a cotton ball and applies it to my skin. When she tells me it might sting a bit, I wince and hope it looks convincing. She pulls out more bottles and trays, calling them things like "foundation" and "concealer" and "toner," coloring over my blackheads and clogged pores. A few more swipes of a brush, and my cheeks glow.

I gape into the mirror, at the clean, smooth surface that stares back at me, fresh and faultless as newly blown glass.

"And I think that about wraps up the skin-care ish," Kim Possible says. "You've got enough natural color that I'd skip the blush. Lucky."

She tilts her head at me. Her own cheeks are the peach-pink color of a rose, a color that I realize for the first time may have been manufactured in here.

"So - what next?" I ask.

"So - let's put on a bow on it and move on to eyes." Kim Possible squints into my face again. "Honestly, the shape of your eyes is mega-cute." Her enthusiasm bubbles, a characteristic that does not grate on me as much as it should. "We'll play them up with a little liner, and we've got serious knockout potential. Gosh, your eyelashes are great, too. You're not even going to need mascara."

Kim Possible reshapes my thick eyebrows with a pair of tweezers, and I once again cop pain I don't feel. She tells me to close my eyes, and I do, and I feel the cold fluff of a different brush caressing my lower eyelids, leaving behind a moist trail that I have to fight not to wipe off. While she dabs at my lips with garnet-red gloss, the same shade as her hair, she plugs an iPad in and pokes at the buttons. Instantly, bass beats stomp around the room, and a woman with a voice as rich as everything else in the Possible house begins to speak and sing all at once.

I can almost hear my father disapproving of it and telling me to disapprove, too. But if it's playing in Kim's room, it has to be something I'll need to know. "Who's this?" I say. "I've never heard her."

"M.C. Honey." Kim Possible sways from side to side, like her movements are as natural as drawing breath. "She's getting a little up there, if you know what I mean, but rap's coming back. That's what they say, at least."

I create a file on M.C. Honey, phase in a sound bite, and tag it a Coolness Priority. "I like it," I say.

This time, I'm not sure if it's a lie. The beats are strong, but they stop short of rattling the room. A scattered sort of melody winds beneath them, connecting them, rhythm keeping pace like someone else's pulse. Each brand name the woman drops drives deeply into me. I wouldn't be surprised if every single one of them has a place in this room.

"There!" Kim Possible says at last, and she steps back.

Shock waves shoot across my circuits, and I don't have to tell my mouth to fall open. I say nothing, staring at the beauty of the person I have become at her hands. An ache grinds through me, and I have no idea where it began; though I can cry and I can bleed, I'm not supposed to have receptors. I don't have time to figure out where it ends.

Kim Possible caps the lip gloss and drops it into a drawer. "See? What'd I tell you?" She frowns over my shoulder at my reflection. "There's just one problem."

"What?" I say, although I'm pretty sure I know what she means. Drakken and Shego both prepared me for this scenario, Shego's advice proving more helpful.

Just like I thought she would, Kim Possible says, "Your hair."

"I know," I whisper. "It's awful, isn't it?"

"No-o! Athena - "

"It's okay; you don't have to be nice about it." I lift my eyes just enough to beg her with them. "I _do _shower, but people are always surprised when I tell them that. No matter what I do, it ends up looking like - like mystery meat."

"Eww," Kim Possible says. "_So _did not need that reminder." She kneels on the carpet beside me and studies me. "You know, sometimes less is more when it comes to hair."

I raise an eyebrow at her, a move I learned from Shego.

"I mean, there are some people who look absolutely adorable with short hair. Like, I have hair envy every time I look at them. Take Liz from my class. But as soon as it grows out past their shoulders, they can't do anything with it."

My father's hair has grown near his shoulders. He must not be one of those people.

"You just need a trim is all." Kim Possible tweaks one limp strand of hair as if it isn't a scrambled mess.

I keep my fingers as far away from my hair as I can, not drawing attention to it as she moves hers away. Shego taught me what to do with this, too. My hair has a fibrous, man-made weave to it, not enough for someone like Kim Possible to notice, but definitely enough to tip off someone who styles hair for a living.

"I don't know," I say. "I'd be so embarrassed to go into some salon and ask them to fix _this_." I gesture to the scrambled mess. "Besides, I bet _you'd _do a better job."

I recognize the look on Kim Possible's face. It's the same look that pours from Drakken when he is correct about something. The ego has been stroked, and now there is no saying no.

"Are you serious, Athena?" Kim says. At my nod, she stands up and smacks her hands together. "Okay, I'm totally _not _doing that without your mom's permission. You call her, I'll call Wade and get some supplies, and we'll see what we can do. 'Kay?"

I nod again and creep a few stairs down, my cell phone already in my palm. I press my only contact button, and a distorted version of Shego answers. "Yeah, Athena?"

"She's going to give me a haircut," I hiss. Louder, I add, "Is that all right with you, Mom? You're sure?"

"Go right ahead, Pumpkin." I hear a gentle, motherly laugh that probably started as a harsh snicker.

I hang up and climb back into Kim's room, in time to hear a little boy tell her that supplies should be arriving within the hour. He must be Wade, the kid who Shego calls Kim's "tech geek" and who feeds her whatever information she needs to bring the villains down. His voice is so much younger than I imagined it would be. There is no way he's in high school yet.

We sit on the window seat, listening to M.C. Honey throw music at us and feeling the shafts of light that slant across us as the sun retreats behind Middleton's crooked skyline of hills, turning them to charcoal silhouettes. Before it can vanish completely, a drone buzzes into Kim Possible's room, dropping a box into her lap. The flaps peel back, and I stare at a jumble of bottles topped by steel-tipped scissors.

Kim Possible puts her lips close to the droid. "Have I mentioned lately that you stereo-rock, Wade?"

A line of text - AWW, SHUCKS - scrolls across the droid's interface.

My flattery turns out not to have been misplaced. Kim Possible's hands are deft as she tucks my hair underneath itself, snips at it, twists it. Every few seconds, she glances at a holographic video rising from her wristwatch, where a woman I recognize as a friend of Elsa Klieg's demonstrates the art of a perfect haircut. Shampoo scrubs at my scalp, conditioner douses it, and then Kim Possible braids a tiny section of my remaining hair away from my face and presses a patch to it, holding it in place with her fist for long enough that I know Drakken must be squirming in his seat and groaning.

When her fist unfolds and I lean toward the mirror, my hair is shiny and sleek, curved to a sweet stop on either side of my chin. Its ink-black gleams wherever the light meets it, the asymmetrical braid resting against my forehead a deep, vibrant purple. Without the pimples, my dark complexion has been smoothed into milky, tan chocolate.

I could pass for a junior, easily. Maybe even a senior.

"Yikes," I breathe. My father says I get my habit of understatement from Shego, who doesn't seem to know how to feel about that.

"'Yikes' good or 'yikes' bad?" Kim Possible asks. She actually sounds anxious, and my reward center comes alive.

_Not yet, though._

"'Yikes' good." I lean forward and examine the face I can't believe is my own. "You - this is amazing! Thank you so much, Kim!"

I don't look at the mission outfit. I need to project sincerity.

"Well, I hate to say I told you so. But I did," Kim Possible says. "Now, all you need are a few new clothes - I know you're a little taller than I am, but I've got some baggies that'll probably fit you perfectly." She squeezes her face next to mine in the mirror. "'Yikes' is right. Look out, Middleton High! Here comes Athena!"

She has no idea how right she is.

Kim grins at our reflections, as if we are made of the same stuff. Confidence still seeps from her, in spite of everything that has happened to her today. That is why she was so quick to help me. Compared to me, she can't help but look good.

I wonder what it is like to be Kim Possible. This I will find out in a few weeks, as Drakken's plan comes together.

I wonder what it is like to be Athena Smith.

This I will probably never know.


	6. Moving Parts

6\. Moving Parts

Everything was going according to plan.

He'd said as much to Shego last night when Athena had come home, running down the stone stairs to report to them. She had added, "For once," because Shego was apparently legally obligated to throw in at least one insult per conversation. Although, come to think of it, anything Shego was legally obligated to do was exactly the kind of thing she would avoid doing. It was one of her most admirably despicable traits.

Mouthing off to him was one of her least.

Drakken had to admit to being a bit soggy with pride when Athena showed up, all scrubbed and shimmery and glossed, out of place amid the lair's grime. She'd beamed at him, arms folded, elbows cocked as if to say, _Well?_ Drakken had spent the better part of an hour going over her outfit practically seam by seam, trying to figure out what made this one so snazzy and the old one social cyanide.

A black short-sleeved shirt with the collar flipped up and kicked out, not like the ring-around-the-rosy one on the shirt he'd given her. A row of buttons, impractically small, marching down the front with the barely-visible letters _CB _etched into them. Drakken had been trying to figure out what carbon and boron had to do with anything when Shego told him they stood for _Club Banana_, which sounded more like an exclusive grocery store than a clothing chain, but according to her, it was the cool kids' seal of approval. The waist bent in, losing space to the two pigtails of fabric, tied and springy above the waistband of a short skirt. _Too _short for Drakken's taste, but in the interest of The Plan, he would grudgingly allow it. The skirt's zippers reclined on the sides rather than the front, as if someone had stitched it together sideways, glimmering silver against the grape-rich color, a carefully-selected match for the crooked little braid that had replaced the bangs she no longer needed to duck behind.

The whole ensemble was completed, as Elsa Klieg would say, with a pair of black shoes, the kind with the slab-heels that Shego insisted were more comfortable than the tall, skinny ones. Burgundy socks took a peek at the world from over the tops, curled charmingly down to meet the laces.

And Drakken had squirmed a little, because the man-made girl standing before him bore no signs of his craftsmanship in her perfect skin and red lips and styled hair. She had Kim Possible's fingerprints all over her. That was part of The Plan, of course it was, and since it was _his _Plan, that meant his fingerprints were all over Kim Possible's. She just couldn't see them because he'd used invisible ink. Needed to be invisible, even though he sometimes wanted to throw baby powder over them to make sure they were still there. Couldn't be caught, not this time. If Kim Possible felt like she was running this puppet show, she wouldn't realize she was a marionette, too - not until it was time for Drakken to cut her strings.

(_Oooh_, he would have to remember that line for his memoirs!)

Athena bid them good-bye this morning and bounced out to the bus stop, no dragging backpack or shambling steps today. Shego had commented last night that Athena wore Kim Possible's clothes better than Kim Possible did. Drakken, to be honest, had never given a second or third thought to what his bratty nemesis chose to wear.

But that little prance in Athena's step now? _That _looked so much better on her than it did on Kim Possible. Drakken could still envision, at the flick of a brain cell, her basically dancing her way off the scene while Drakken was having his face ground into the floor by a Global Justice agent and discovering how difficult it was to keep tears at bay when a man straight off the cover of an exercise DVD had his knee buried in the center of your back.

Tears from a supervillain were like blood from a surfer. Everyone got a whiff of sodium chloride - salt, in layman's terms - and sensed easy prey. And from all directions they swarmed in to feast on him.

Well, there were no tears today. Drakken's eyes were bone-dry - well, as bone-dry as a man could get them without jeopardizing the well-being of his contacts - as he watched Athena stride into Middleton High, shoulder-to-confident-shoulder with Kim Possible. The scrawny kid in the too-big pants stumbled behind them, grinning like a court jester. But it was nothing compared to the dazzling smile Athena fixed on her face, neck arched high, as soon as the double doors thumped shut behind her.

Most everyone in the hall turned curious heads their direction. Curiosity turned to slack-jawed admiration when Athena came bouncing across the linoleum in a rattle of zippers. Significant glances passed back and forth between girls, and in Drakken's next blink, the lot of them had surrounded Athena like a flock of shiny-feathered flamingos.

Not Kim Possible. His Athena.

Athena's transmitter ears were receiving such a flurry of shrill adolescent sound bites that Drakken's nervous system would have coiled up and hissed if they hadn't been _compliments_ \- genuine, thirst-quenching _compliments_! Granted, the the students were praising Athena's fashion sense rather than Drakken's genius, but that would serve as a worthy warm-up act before the screaming fans turned their attention on him. He balled up his fist and sucked on it because fireworks were a-burst in his brain, and this was the only way he could manage to breathe.

The crowd pushed Kim Possible back against a bank of lockers, and she stayed there, her expression the closest thing to stupefied Drakken had ever seen on her. Confusion knit her brows together, but it wasn't enough. He wanted to watch them plunge and know that her heart was doing the same thing, that there was a trench carved and waiting in the pit of her stomach for it to land in, and he just wasn't seeing it.

Not until a certain sophomore, her tan looking even more firmly baked-on today than yesterday, turned from the gaggle of kids and wound her fingers around Kim Possible's sleeve. "Kim?" the girl said. Her voice reminded Drakken of a dose of rattlesnake venom hidden deep in the center of a birthday cake, and his rear bounced in his seat of its own free will. "Who is _that_?"

"That's Athena. Athena Smith." Kim Possible tried a smile, and it was no more successful than Drakken's attempts to sit still would have been. "She's new this year."

"Freshman?" Tan Girl asked. Drakken nearly threw himself across the console toward the speakers just to make sure - was that _really _a hint of incredulity he heard?

Kim Possible nodded.

"Oh my gosh, are you _serious_?" Tan Girl said. _Why, yes, indeed, that is incredulity!_ "That's amazing. Most freshmen are like something from the Adopt-a-Geek Foundation." Each word seemed to stick another candle into the venom-loaded birthday cake, and she smiled as if to encourage Kim to take bigger bites. "Not _you_, of course, Kim."

It wasn't sarcasm, not exactly, Drakken mused - he had had Shego on his payroll often enough to recognize the sound of that beast. But it was covered in insincerity, dripping it everywhere. He was ready to offer this girl an internship.

With another fluff of her equally-tan hair, the girl turned back to the group, now more noisy than any flamingo flock. Drakken's geometrically-trained eye couldn't help but notice that they had formed a near-perfect circle with Athena as the midpoint - and Kim Possible, he was delighted to see, nudged to outside the radius. She stood watching them, still attempting to work up a smile every few seconds only to have it lapse into a look of utter bewilderment.

Yes, it was just as Drakken had planned. Nothing in her life had prepared Kim Possible for having to share the spotlight that all but glowed out from inside her. She'd grown used to outshining everyone within ten thousand miles, including her court-jester friend, who was even now wedging his way in between two girls with three or four inches on him, dressed in spangled uniforms of gold and white.

Kim Possible shoved off the locker as if it had personally offended her. Now _her _backpack was about to drag across the floor, and there was no evidence she was even aware of it.

"Heavy, isn't it, Kim Possible?" Drakken blurted out, bitterness flooding the back of his throat. "Hurts, doesn't it? Knowing you can give everything you've got, and it will never - be - enough? That all the glory will always go to someone else?"

Shego glanced up from her nail file to send him a bemused look. "Uh, Doc? You do realize she can't hear you, right?"

The hairs on the back of Drakken's neck sharpened into pineapple prickles. "Of course I realize that, Shego! I wouldn't be _talking _to her if she could hear!"

As far as Drakken was concerned, it was every bit as snappy a display of attitude as any of Shego's. She didn't appear to agree with him, rolling her cat-like eyes and returning her attention to whatever she thought she was filing on her gloves. The prickles grew pricklier, graduating from pineapple prickles to pineapple _leaves_, which could actually inflict a pretty nasty cut, Drakken remembered reading in prison. Pretty soon afterward, he had begun plans for his Pineapple Leaf Terror Blade, but the good-for-nothing guard didn't even give him any pineapples to work with.

Just cold and dark and lots of smirks.

Drakken's fist crashed up to his mouth again and he gurgled around it. _No. Not prison. Don't think about prison._

While he was at it, he shouldn't be thinking of Shego's sass, either. She could have downtalked him as much as she liked, and it would have changed the brilliance of his Plan not a whit (whatever one of those was). Athena had already begun bedazzling Kim Possible's peers, and from behind a one-way radio in his clever little robot's head, Kim Possible had no idea he was jeering at her.

That would have been unsatisfying if it hadn't been so perfect. Until Kim Possible threw all of her poker chips into the center of the table, Drakken was going to wear his cards so close to his chest you'd think they'd been ironed on to the front of his lab coat.

Or something like that.

The warning bell rang just then, echoing off the aureate-yellow walls, as insistent as a tornado siren. It could have very well been Drakken's Plan blaring out over the whole school, and oh, how marvelous would that be? Keeping something this magnificent and wow-inspiring a secret was like holding a chili pepper on his tongue - it tingled and stung and could easily classify as hazardous to his health.

Kim Possible set her jaw so tightly, Drakken could almost feel the crunch in his own back molars. He half-expected her to stare straight ahead and grind out the line the noblest of heroes in sci-fi films always said after they took a hit for humanity: "It's just a flesh wound."

That was another thing Drakken didn't understand, along with one of the few things he doubted he ever _would_. He had received multiple flesh wounds in his life, the most notable still embossed on his skin, perma-stitches forming the shape of a parabola beneath his eye. Each one of them was enough to turn the world into a blurry, pain-speckled mess. How did those soldiers handle it? Nobility didn't make you invulnerable. Your nerve cells still detected pain no matter how valiant you were. And no amount of courage would knit your flesh back together, stop the bleeding, ward off the infection.

Even now the idea hobbled, half-formed and shaking, across Drakken's mind. How did they _do _it?

Kim Possible charged ahead into the crowd, swimming upstream like a salmon. Drakken tried to will some passing student to step on the back of her spotless white tennis shoes and send her sprawling to the floor, preferably in front of some very cute boy - or "mega-hot" or whatever teenage girls today used to describe the young men they swooned over.

Hmmm. Maybe, in addition to Athena, he should have invented a robotic older boy to lead Kim Possible along and then break her heart at the most inopportune of moments. It might have been the only thing crueler than what he was doing right now.

Everything else got knocked out of Drakken's head once Kim Possible arrived in homeroom. Her foot crossed the threshold at the exact instant the tardy bell rang its mocking, somebody's-in-trouble tune - technically not late. But all the other students had already found their seats, including Athena, who sat in the front row and, Drakken knew, smiled angelically at yet another member of the one teacher's platoon of clones. The room fell so quiet that Drakken could practically hear the man's neck crick as it turned toward Kim Possible. _His _jaw, set at nearly ninety degrees, out-toughed the brave face she had tacked on.

In fact, even as Drakken watched, it dissolved into the look of a person who had just swallowed sawdust and wasn't sure if it was worth the embarrassment to try and cough it back up. She marched to the one empty desk left and perched on it as though she expected it to come to life and buck her off.

Drakken rubbed his hands together, the friction in his gloves matching what he could feel scrabbling away inside his chest, desperate to be realized. The hardest part of delayed gratification was the delay. "We're wearing her down, Shego," he said. "The human heart can only take so many blows before a person goes loopy."

Shego's next breath came out a snicker, pointed in the wrong direction. "You speaking from personal experience again, Doc?"

Drakken fanned his fingers across the front of his lab coat, across the front of the barb he refused to let her see sticking out of his center. "I am _not _loopy!" he retorted hotly - literally hotly, his voice scorching his throat. "I am. . . I am a functional maniac!"

Shego smiled, hard and biting. "Define 'functional.'"

He didn't. Couldn't. Wasn't his fault - some container of universal solvent had tipped over in his brain, eradicating _any _definitions of _any_thing. If only Athena were here! She had the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's downloaded on a chip in her head.

Then again, if Athena were here, that meant she wouldn't be smack-dab in the middle of Kim Possible's comfy little life, chipping it away one piece at a time. . .

"I'm upright, aren't I?" Drakken said, to himself and to the eyes he could feel slanting his way. "And I managed to get over six hours of sleep last night!"

"In a row?" Shego's eyes widened, guileless pools that could make a person almost believe that she didn't have another quip in her quiver, that she would never have insulted anyone ever.

Maybe that was what lulled Drakken into admitting, "No."

Shego shook her head, and Drakken was sure the motion of her hair created actual air currents. Didn't help cool his throat down any. He glared at her and kept glaring until she jerked her chin toward the screen, and then he wished he hadn't. Maybe then he would have missed her disgust. Or the way she returned her eyes to the Athena-cam without asserting herself, as if there had never been a challenge issued in the first place.

The chili pepper smoldered on his taste buds.

When the relief bell rang, Kim Possible was the first to bolt for the door. She looked at the crowd that surged past it as if she wanted to fling out a leg and take them all down at the knees like she had done to Shego last summer. But she couldn't. She was outnumbered.

And the masses consumed Kim Possible the same way they had once devoured a little boy named Drew.

Well, not _exactly _the same way. Kim Possible was absorbed into a faceless, indifferent blob, whereas Drew had been set upon by voracious Tasmanian devils not nearly as endearing as the ones in cartoons.

But that boy Drew didn't exist anymore, and he wasn't watching through Drakken's eyes as Drakken watched through Athena's, and he _certainly _wasn't reliving how it felt to be stuffed into a gym locker and wadded up so he was nearly swallowing his own elbow. All that remained was Dr. Drakken, and he too had evolved into a predator. The scariest, slinkiest of predators - a snake. Last year, he was a pathetic type of snake, rattling before he struck so that everyone in the entire state knew his whereabouts and had time to leap out of the way. Now, however, he was an entirely different species of snake, one whose soundless slither gave no warning, whose fangs sunk into your flesh without drawing any attention to himself.

Drakken's venom flowed through Kim Possible's veins already, and she wasn't even _aware _of it.

At lunchtime, Athena chose to sit with Kim Possible and the buffoon, despite invitations from both the crispy-tanned sophomore and an entire group of upperclassmen who still congregated around that one stupid table that was flooded in golden light at exactly high noon. He and Shego had already been over this with Athena - well, okay, it was mostly Shego's instructions. "You don't need to become a goddess overnight," she'd told Athena. "It's more believable if it's slower - not to mention a LOT more painful."

As ego-bruising as it was to acknowledge someone else's good idea, Drakken had had to concede. His own sometimes-accidental research into nearly every field of unpleasantness - bandage removal, vomiting - had taught him they could all be worsened by dragging them out. And he wanted Kim Possible to have acid indigestion for hours before she was finally able to throw up, wanted to peel the bandage back one excruciating follicle at a time.

Then she would know what it was like to be a person of non-interest.

"So, Athena," the buffoon said now, dunking a fossilized French fry in watery ketchup. "You ever see any polar bears up there in the Arctic?"

"Only from a distance." Athena stirred through the amorphous mystery mush ladled onto her tray. Today, nobody questioned why she wasn't chowing down. "They usually avoid people if they have the choice."

The kid gaped at her. "So - you're not afraid of them?"

Drakken flung himself forward across the control panel, its curved edge punching his belt, as if the closer he got to Athena, the greater his chances were of getting through to her. He _knew _that wasn't how her one-way senses worked, and he did it anyway. The conversation they had rehearsed seventeen or eighteen times last night hung ripe in front of her, its juices only one minor segue away. They couldn't mess up now.

But he needn't have doubted Athena. "Not really. What I'm scared of are sharks," she began, precisely as practiced. "My dad keeps reminding me that there are hundreds of types of sharks, and only, like, four of them are known to be dangerous -"

Drakken felt a grin stretch like poisoned taffy across his face. He was, of course, the dad she was referring to, and what she said was true, really. Any mad genius worth his weight in Doomsday devices knew which sharks to have sent over from the Central Headquarters Of Aquatic Supervillainy. Your average, everyday villain who put in an order for "sharks," no specifications, could end up with anything from sharks too tiny to do any damage to enormous sharks with no teeth and no mean streaks.

" - but I think I've just seen _Jaws _too many times," Athena said, her gaze unwavering and sincere. She must have gotten that from Shego. That girl could lie without betraying so much as a drop of perspiration.

"I saw _Jaws _once, and it was too many times," the buffoon said. "We were nine -"

"Eight," Kim Possible said. Always correcting, always straightening the corners of everything anyone said. "And I was going through a rebellious period. The 'rents had already told me that I was so _not _allowed to watch it for at LEAST another couple of years, but I was so determined to see it I borrowed it from the library -"

"- but she didn't want to watch it alone, so she dragged me into it." The buffoon picked up the conversation as if it were a wire that he knew exactly where to plug in. "I'll never see the ocean the same way again."

"Hey, at least it wasn't _Planet of the Apes_," Kim Possible said.

The kid clutched the sides of his head. "Why would you _say _that?" His voice was on a ledge, just one good push away from toppling over.

"Yeah. Those terrifying apes," Shego muttered.

_Apes_? As in simians? Primates? Drakken suddenly wished this kid had been the root of the problem all along; it would have been so much easier to break him. All you'd have to do was tell him that biologically speaking, _he _was classified as a primate, too, and watch him unravel.

But it would have been unnecessary, Drakken was forced to conclude. The buffoon's freshman year would take care of that _for _them. He could tell by the backs turned toward their table that this kid was the wad of gum stuck to the bottom of the in-crowd's shoe. Middleton High had broken stronger kids than him.

"Good thing they haven't made any horror movies about roaches," the buffoon said. "I can't stand them."

"Who can?" Kim Possible said. Some of the old verve had returned to her voice, and she plunged a plastic cafeteria spoon into her Jell-O with composure that made Drakken want to find the biggest cockroach in North America and chuck it at her through the screen.

Athena blinked at Kim Possible. "Are you scared of roaches, too?" she asked.

"No. They just gross me out," Kim Possible said. "The only animal I'm really scared of is -"

Drakken breathed harder, faster. No one at the table had any idea that a snake lurked in their midst, just out of sight behind Athena's light-sensing corneas - much less that Kim Possible was about to drop live prey in its lap.

(Not that snakes had laps.)

"- electric eels. When I was, like, four, I stuck my mom's salad tongs in the toaster, and I can still feel the shock every time I think about it. Knowing there's something out there that can do that _and _bite me _and _hide in rocks? Total creep city."

Kim Possible shuddered. The mighty and overachieving Kim Possible - the one who grabbed his wrist last summer and threatened to break it, her fingers much too strong for a girl who wasn't old enough to smoke - actually shuddered.

Drakken sat straight up in his chair, cackling over the crackling in his back, startling the muggy lair into echoes. He whipped his head toward Shego, and their eyes snapped together like the halves of an Easter egg. She already had her laptop open and balancing on her knees.

And that was why it was important to keep a magnet of opposing polarity around, counter-intuitive as it might have seemed.

Drakken rocked still closer to the screen, until he could feel the hum of static electricity simmering inches from his face. Balancing on tiptoe, he spread out his arms, wing style, holding his elbows as far away from his body as he could.

For some reason.

* * *

Drakken would never forget the look in Kim Possible's eyes when she passed by the gymnasium after final bell and did a double take at the sight of the cheerleaders grouped around Athena, shimmering in the sleeveless, midriff-less golden top and, in Drakken's estimation, looking snazzier in it than any of the other girls, including the seniors. It was confusion and disappointment and displacement and betrayal, repeating variations of them, layers and layers of them like his mother's ravioli, only bitter instead of savory.

Not that that kept Drakken from savoring it. Not by a long shot. He could actually feel himself salivating as his nourishment was inched toward him, closer and closer, so tantalizingly close that it was all he could do not to try to stab it with a fork.

But - not yet.

Kim Possible flashed the room a smile she must have managed to cough up somehow. "Athena. Hey. Does this mean you guys changed your mind? You're letting freshmen on the squad now?"

Athena ducked her head, the very essence of humility.

"We made an exception for Athena," Tan Girl said with a disdainful huff that sounded not one bit like her bronchial tubes had been compromised. How this girl could reach such heights of mockery unattainable by a man who'd been a supervillain longer than she'd been alive - it was a mystery to Drakken.

"Well, could you make an exception for me, too?" Kim Possible said. She paused and added, "Please?"

Tan Girl broke free from the knot of cheerleaders and floated over to Kim Possible. Her voice grew whispery without truly quieting any. "See, the thing is, Kim, Athena showed up yesterday and auditioned for us. And she was, like, scary-perfect. And I've seen you cheer. I mean, you're good, don't get me wrong, but there's no way you can measure up to the moves Athena whipped out last night." She ran a hand up and down Kim Possible's forearm, a move that made Drakken's own arm hairs prickle.

Kim Possible - the mighty, overachieving Kim Possible - took a step backward. She tightened her grip on her backpack straps until the color fled from her knuckles.

Drakken had the distinct feeling that he'd just felled a bull moose.

"Aww, too bad, Kimmy," Shego said from where she lounged upon a plastic chair as if it were her throne. "Just because you risk your butt to save the world every day of your life doesn't mean it's gonna pay you back. Hard lesson to learn, isn't it?"

Drakken glanced at her in surprise, and he knew in that moment he was staring at a wounded animal. The ones you saw on TV, the ones whose condition was revealed in their eyes - not in pain, but in ferocity. He had never considered that the beast who dripped sarcasm and plasma was nursing an old injury. He'd never thought of Shego at all except in relation to him. Realizing that now was like snapping his own wrist with a rubber band.

Tan Girl gave Kim Possible another look that did everything but pour sap all over her and flounced her skirt back to her cheerleading buddies. Drakken laughed into his sleeve as he watched Kim Possible carry her subtly hunched shoulders over to the double doors. In the doorway, she stopped and scanned the gymnasium that was unfamiliar to her and all too familiar to Drakken.

Like she didn't recognize this life that was cycloning out of her control. Like _she _was the one stuck underground, breathing in mushroom spores.

The chili pepper sweetened on his tongue, but it blistered his taste buds, too, triumph undermined by a refrain of _not enough. Not enough. Not! Enough!_ He wanted to break her. _Needed _to break her as payback for breaking him and shipping his shattered pieces off to prison.

_The plan. Remember the plan, Drakken._

This right here, this not-enough moment where he watched Kim Possible blink completely dry eyes and head outside to catch the bus, was nothing more than an appetizer. In a matter of time, she would be served a seven-course meal of misery, only it would be him who feasted. Him, Dr. Drakken, the conqueror. He would bring it all down on the head of this overconfident adolescent. She'd thought she could just take down a supervillain and then move on as if nothing had changed, thought that a man who had invented a brain-swapping machine and planned to use it to pilfer military weaponry lacked the intelligence and the cruelty to to outsmart and out-strike her.

A stream of static erupted from the school loudspeaker in that way that always scraped down Drakken's spine like a rusty machete. Somewhere underneath it, there were words. Drakken imagined them spilling from the ceiling, dripping down to the floor, spelling out Kim Possible's defeat.

What a defeat it would be.

Anger found Drakken again, a slash across his soul, harsh and inflamed, with pus and everything. (It didn't get much more disgusting than pus.)

The only thing to do was rise and pace - well, pace as best as he could in such a dinky lair. Drakken was pretty sure he'd seen picture frames for sale bigger than this place. He paced and paced and paced and paced, up and down, around in a circle, paced until every muscle burned with vengeance, the only thing that could keep up with him. Staying still allowed other things, such as hypothetical fear or equally-hypothetical loneliness, to tag along and try to hitch a ride.

Hypothetically speaking.

When his feet had finally been exhausted, Drakken tripped over to the very, very compact desk that barely furnished one corner, so different from the looming, gargantuan one in his old lair. The burned-down lair. He was hunched over this inadequate replacement when the trap door above his head creaked open and Athena slipped inside. Above her, the evening sky was faded and soft, beckoning Drakken to come frolic in its warmth.

Drakken shook the thought off as if it were a bug. Supervillains did _not _frolic in the late-summer twilight, did not look upon the evening sky and see anything but their own images superimposed, claiming ownership.

_Supervillains also aren't afraid of bugs, _Drakken could hear Jack Hench oozing in his head.

Yes, well, that was easy for him to ooze when he wasn't holed up in claustrophobic quarters with roaches asleep under his couch.

Drakken glanced up from his artistic rendering of the remainder of the plan. Three grinning figures looked up from the happy ending he'd sketched for them - one blue, one green, and the third more traditionally-toned. He only needed another few seconds to add a redheaded person slumped into a lowercase-g pose on the ground, bawling her heart out.

"We got her today, didn't we?" Athena was at his side in an instant, and her eager expression made Drakken's own heart do jumping jacks.

"We got her all right!" Drakken cried. "In your face!" he added. Because he could.

"Ugh. I think you should leave the being-hip part to me," Athena said and immediately followed it up with a hug.

Drakken envied her coldness, her flawlessness, the promise of strength stashed away somewhere in her smooth arms. She was everything he needed to be.

The thought splashed into Drakken's stomach like milk two days past its expiration date. It _probably _wouldn't make him sick, but that didn't mean he was comfortable having it inside him, either. He gave Athena's shoulder a squeeze and stepped back, rocking up on his heels to emphasize his status as the tallest one in the room. "Well, with your help, I have managed to construct the rest of the plan!"

Shego and Athena groaned in unison, though Athena almost smiled while she did it.

"Now, now, now. None of that, ladies!" Drakken wagged his finger at them, and then he grabbed his drawing and shook it out in front of him as fast as he could, before they got a chance to glower at him. "Phase Three goes into effect starting tomorrow. As you can see in Step One here. . ."

On "Step One," Drakken let an index finger creep around the edge of the paper and take a stab at what he theorized to be the corresponding visual aid. The giggles from his audience told him he'd probably missed. Sure enough, when he craned his head to the side, Drakken could see that his finger had landed directly in the center of his crayoned likeness's grin - several steps down from the top.

Honestly. And Shego called _him _immature?

Heat crawled across Drakken, scorching a trail on his skin. Why did it have to _burn _so badly, be so different from Athena's chill or Shego's simmer? He straightened up, held the paper tighter, and adopted his professional-supervillain accent. "As you can see in Step One here," he repeated, gesturing to the drawing of stick-Athena surrounded by a throng of faceless, less-important sticks, "tomorrow Athena accepts the invitation to eat lunch with the popular kids. Three days from today, when Kim Possible's spirit is crushed. . ."

"It's gonna take longer than that," Shego said, without being so courteous as to raise her hand. "THAT girl's spirit? Yeah, it won't break easily."

"_One week_ from today," Drakken amended, clenching down hard on the words, "Shego shall launch Step Two and stage a break-in at. . . at. . ." He turned to look at Shego and interrupted himself rather than give her the pleasure. "Did you find electric eels anywhere around here?"

"Yup. The Upperton Biology Research Lab's got a whole tank full of them. Don't know what around there is worth stealing, but I bet I can come up with _some_thing." Shego's eyes were steel-plated slits. She no longer appeared to be capable of anything as jovial as giggling.

"Excellent! We shall lure Kim Possible there - and, you, Athena, shall accompany her on this mission! It will be your job to lose to Shego, but just barely! Shego, you've got to make sure Kim Possible takes a swim with those electric eels!" An exclamation point jumped out at the end of every sentence, the natural byproduct of the pure anticipation swelling in Drakken's veins.

Shego sent him a salute. Probably a mock one, but Drakken chose to lap it up anyway. He needed all the sustenance he could get.

"In the meantime, Step Three -" Drakken dragged his finger down to another stick-Athena, this one holding a test that was _perhaps _too large in proportion to her, but who even cared with that red A+ inked across it? - "we begin to raise Athena's grades, until eventually she's receiving perfect scores on everything." He nodded to the real Athena. "Having Google for a brain should help with that."

She nodded back. "Then what?"

Ahhhh. No one had ever asked him to _continue _before. Drakken held it close to his chest for a moment and then announced in his best boom, "Finally, Step Four - when we have calculated Kim Possible is at peak vulnerability, we swoop in and 'kidnap' Athena, thus luring Kim Possible to our lair - such as it is," he couldn't help grumbling - "where I shall tell her my plan in great detail!"

Shego sighed, low but not soft. Nothing that came out of Shego was ever soft. "And WHY exactly do you have to do that?"

The question itched at Drakken. No, not the question - the doubt. Not even suspicious doubt. The kind of doubt a parent would wear when their five-year-old announced that they would be flying over to Agraba on their magic carpet.

"It must be done, Shego! It must be done to show that in the face of such seemingly crushing odds, Dr. Drakken has triumphed - Dr. Drakken and his _team_ have triumphed," Drakken added, because Shego was giving him a laser-look and Athena's wasn't much safer. "She needs to see how hard we have worked and how long we have waited to watch her fall from her perfect little pedestal. Besides - it'll be cruel, won't it?"

That lit Shego up a bit - not as much as Drakken would've hoped, but more so than he would've feared. The majority vote inside him that craved world domination was glad to see it. There was still that one little pocket of dissent, though - the part that saw her youngness - and that part found it. . . well, not _sad _exactly. Not eerie, either. Drakken wasn't even sure there was a word for it: the feeling of listening to a very catchy tune, dancing to it, only to have it end out of absolutely nowhere. No climactic crescendo, no final fading-away notes, just going one minute and stopping the next.

"Sounds good," Shego said. She and Athena exchanged smirks. Drakken tried to accompany them with a smirk of his own, but it felt wrong when he wore it. Wrong size. Wrong shape. Wrong format. The greatness of his plan and of his genius was building up inside him like a pressure cooker, and if he didn't grab a valve and open it, the meat would be all dry and stringy and have no flavor, and Drakken couldn't figure out exactly where he was going with that analogy, but he _did _know he needed to laugh maniacally.

And laugh he did. He threw back his head and let the sound come ringing, singing out of him, bigger and more forceful than the body it emerged from, shaking it from stem to stern. That laughter rushed around the lair, bounced off the ceiling and the walls, pushed at them, giving him a little more room.

A little. But not enough.

"And at last -" Drakken paused, and in that pause he smelled at least seven different fungus or fungi or funguses or whatever they were called - "I'll be able to get out of this dump!"

Shego folded her arms, and it looked too much like a warning for Drakken's comfort. "'This dump,' Dr. D., is the only place I could find that didn't want three months' rent up front. Which is something I hear you have a problem with."

Mockery laced the words. Drakken felt his entire body clench up like a giant fist - maybe not giant for a person, but certainly giant for a fist - a fist he, at any rate, didn't know what to do with.

_Think positive_. The thought was a hiccup in his head. It was what Mother would have said to him - well, perhaps not if she knew he was plotting global conquest and the ruin of a teenage girl. Could still prove useful, though.

"Well, I suppose if nothing else, I could always go into business selling penicillin!" Drakken exclaimed in true positive-thinker fashion.

Shego snapped out a laugh. "Yeah. That'd be a great way to lose your license."

"License?" Drakken repeated. His brain immediately launched into its spin cycle, going through every type of license a human being could get - driver's, marriage, fishing, weapon. . . none of which he had - before finally landing on the answer his own self-proclaimed title should have given him. License to practice medicine. "Oh. I'm not _that _kind of doctor, Shego."

Drakken threw all his energy into rolling his eyes and flexing his wrist. A tiny dot of panic, a microbe really, had just awakened somewhere inside of him, and it was already bashing into every cell it could find, trying to turn them, infect them. He couldn't let it get far.

Shego's own eyes constricted, and they must have been connected to Drakken's throat somehow, because it tightened along with them. "Not 'that' kind of doctor? Just what _is _your doctorate in, exactly?"

"Oh, you know -" Drakken forced a smile - "miscellaneous."

Shego checkmarked an eyebrow at him. "Miscellaneous. Now _that _sounds legit. For Pete's sake, did you even GO to college?"

The words, with their disconcertingly playful tone, left gouges in Drakken's soul so deep he had no choice but to holler into them, trying to shout them shut. "Of course I did! Like every thinking, ambitious citizen of this country, I went to college! And I did quite well, Ms. Doubting Thomas...ina!"

Drakken's voice exploded out of him and swelled further when it hit the air, crowding out mold and moss and mushrooms and all the truths he didn't want to tell. It wasn't exactly a lie, though. He _had _gone to college, and he _had _excelled academically.

What he hadn't done was complete it.

_You won't let us down, will ya, buddy? You'll come through with dates, right?_

Drakken's knees grew weak, watery. It felt just like the time at last year's Annual Villain Gathering when Duff Killigan had slammed him in the patella with a golf club in an argument over whether or not golf counted as a sport. Much as Drakken hated to admit it, Duff had won. Anyone who could hurt someone that badly qualified to be a jock.

Flakes of sound peeled off Drakken's tongue, every bit as painfully as if they'd been chunks of skin. Shego and Athena were staring at him as if he'd sprouted antennae and an exoskeleton within the last ninety seconds. Drakken held up a hand he was surprised to still be able to move. "Take five," he gasped with his last bit of strength. "Professional break!"

With that, Drakken turned and staggered off to the area of the rent-free dump he'd claimed as his quarters, which really consisted of nothing more than a floor-mattress and a wall-mirror sectioned off from the rest of the lair with a bedsheet hooked into the ceiling. Just like prison. So much like prison it ran Drakken's breathing ragged.

Drakken let himself fall onto the mattress and coiled himself up on his side, his legs drawn up to his chest, quivering beneath his mighty chin. The mattress was big enough to fit a modestly-sized man like Drakken - big enough to fit two or three Drakkens, if he was honest - but it suddenly frightened Drakken, the thought of taking up any more surface area than he needed. He had to condense the hurt that was alive in his gut, plugging up his ears like wads of cotton.

Yet not enough so that he couldn't still hear it - the harsh laughter of his dearest friends. Who were _supposed _to be his dearest friends. Not enough that he didn't still see and feel the whole thing happening all over again, as clearly as if he had time-traveled back to a spot he never wanted to visit again.

_He hopped nervously into the room. Bebe Prototypes One, Two, Three, and Four rolled in after him. He indicated them with a flourish._

_"What the _heck_, man? I thought you said you were getting us dates!"_

_"These _are _your dates!" His tender nineteen-year-old voice cracked._

_Three different foreheads puckered into identical disbelief. "Did you _build _these?"_

_The right reaction, but somehow not the right reaction at all. It was supposed to be exhaled in awe, not snorted, not the punch line of a joke he wasn't in on._

_He bit his lip. Tasted copper. Atomic number twenty-nine._

_"I'll show you!" he cried. He turned to Bebe Two and bowed a sweeping bow, dramatic and respectful at the same time. "Bebe, may I have this dance?"_

_"Affirmative," she said. "Bebe will dance." _

_And then the next thing he knew, he was suspended above the floor, held by hard metal arms, _his _right arm wrenched backward and pinned there with flower-extension hands. A gush of heat like nothing he'd ever felt before burst at the base of his spine. Even then, he knew his back would never be the same again._

_"G-g-gentle as a summer shower, no?" he stuttered. He had to keep trying, had to sell it. He was the salesman who had to get a foot in the door or be canned._

_"No."_

_One of them said it. Or maybe all of them said it. Then they broke into perfectly harmonized, expertly choreographed laughter. The kind of laughter that had followed him around from the first day of preschool. The kind of laughter like an elbow in the face. He hung there, contorted and bruising, while they continued to hoot and snigger and every other term for "laugh" in the thesaurus._

_It must have been hours later when someone finally, roughly pried Bebe's arms from him. He slammed into the floor, knocking out what little wind remained in him. From there he faced expressions he didn't know how to interpret. Expressions that seemed to belong to enemies rather than friends._

_"I just gotta ask - you're not planning to pursue a career in robotics, are you?" _

How dare you? _It was what he should have said, what he wanted to say. He couldn't find it, though, couldn't get a grip on it and push it out into the open._

_There was a bubble under the floor's rubber matting, above the wood, rising up like yeast. Not yeast, though - this was a whole other chemical process he was observing, with its own name and its own explanation, but he couldn't remember it. He couldn't remember. Couldn't win._

_"Boy, I sure hope not! Can you imagine what would happen if this kid was in charge of building our flight drones?"_

_This kid. As if he weren't in the room. As if he wasn't sprawled at their feet, begging them with his eyes to reconsider their scorn. As if he weren't. Right. There._

_And then, all of a sudden, he wasn't._

_He was alone, in a geometric plane all to himself, where he was used to being. He wasn't their friend anymore. They weren't his friends anymore. _

_If they ever had been._

Drakken cringed against the mattress, the old injuries in his back and his heart crying out for tending, his pulse in hysteria between his temples. Sounds still flew out of him, short and jagged and chewed-off like someone's anxiety-ravaged fingernails. He tried to shut his eyes, to picture Athena in her cheerleading uniform and the look on Kim Possible's face as that rejection had punched into her.

But the only faces he saw waiting for him were tearing themselves open to cackle endlessly at him. Their mouths yawned like sinkholes, swallowing Drakken's ego whole and spitting out the bones, only they _didn't _spit out the bones, because he was still choking on them. Still choking on _something_.

_Stop!_

_It!_

They didn't listen. When he conquered them and stood before them as their Supreme Potentate, they would have to listen.

_Good will always win out_. Something else his mother always said. And, bless her soul, she was mistaken. No one had come to rescue Drakken. Good hadn't won out in his life. It had chucked him into some sort of cosmic lost-socks pile and run away giggling.

And he wasn't going to rest until he could guarantee it not winning out in Kim Possible's life, either.


	7. Status Report 1-point-8

_Status Report 1.8_

_Social life successfully undermined. Supplement with assault on crimefighting skills._

I board the bus with yet another secret hidden in the inventory of my mind. Tonight, Shego is going to break into the Upperton Biology Research Lab and steal a Biometric Power Converter.

Kim and Ron get on together, as usual. Ron waves and greets me in a voice like a hug, and I press closer to the window so they can share my seat, Kim's body closer to me than Ron's but her eyes farther away.

When we reach Middleton High and pile off the bus, Ron throws an arm around each of us, wishing us a terrific day, smothering us in oblivious cheer. I glance out of the corner of my eye at Kim, as if I am embarrassed; the ultraviolet lights under my skin even light up, so that my cheeks redden. The smile she gives me is thin, a single strand of hair.

My instructions for today were to lay fairly low in preparation for the big scene this evening. "Don't _create _any opportunities to humiliate her," Drakken told me this morning as he handed me my plaid backpack. "But, should one arise, by all means seize it!"

I get that chance when Mr. Barkin chooses Kim from a pack of sleepy students, asks her to come multiply the two quadratic equations he has written without so much as an ink smudge on the whiteboard. Kim stands up, pushes out of her desk, and walks down the aisle, straight-legged, neck as rigid as mine, as if she too is made of metal and wire and vulcanized rubber.

She does not get the problem correct. She multiplies the components in the wrong order. It is an easy mistake to make, and no one in the room even snickers at her for it, but I see the cringe shake her body as hard as a punch. There is no room inside her for mistakes.

Less room than there is in Mr. Barkin, who shakes his head and calls, "Can anyone here show Possible where she went wrong?"

I power down to a slow, timid mode and slip my hand into the air. Mr. Barkin smiles - it's the first time I've ever seen him do it, and it makes his eyes not look quite so small and flat. He nods for me to take my place beside Kim and passes me a dry-erase marker the shade of Drakken's lab coat.

The felt tip touches the whiteboard and rearranges the numbers.

"Exactly!" Barkin claps me on the back. "Brilliant job. Thank you, Athena!"

"Thanks, Athena," Kim mumbles.

She doesn't break eye contact, but I cut her another sidelong glance and fold my bottom lip between my teeth, expressing sympathy that in reality is outside of my capacity. It will not flow from my programming any more than blood will ever flow from my lip.

But for a moment, a moment so quick it escapes even the timer in my head, I think I feel my lip prickle.

In the cafeteria, I sit across from Kim and pick at the clumps of unidentifiable meat which she has long since stopped trying to convince me to eat. She pushes hers around on her tray, too, occasionally raising spoonfuls and swallowing them like messages that cannot fall into the wrong hands. Ron arrives for lunch late and wet and red-cheeked from an encounter with a malfunctioning water fountain just outside the band room. The story he recounts involves pants loss and public humiliation, his high-pitched words about to drag the ground when they are stopped.

By Kim. Her hand coming to rest on his arm. Its gentle squeeze. Relief shimmering in his eyes and his fingers wrapping around hers, separating after six seconds like they have timers counting in their heads too, like they have calculated, many times, the precise moment when other kids would begin to notice and jeer. Not the touch I have seen between upperclassmen who are dating. They fit together as simply and naturally as my silicon shoulder bones join with their mesh sockets.

"Is. . . is everything going okay with you, KP?" Ron asks.

Kim rests the side of her face against her palm. "Well, everything sounds 'okay' in comparison to _that_. So, yeah, I'll be fine."

I don't trust her words.

Neither does Ron. He kneels on the cold bench and tilts his head to the side to look at Kim. A private transmission passes between them, the one kind Drakken and Shego never taught me to decode.

But I don't need to. I know what's wrong with Kim. _I_ am what's wrong with Kim.

I was made to be what's wrong with Kim.

* * *

I feel my connection to my creators dim as I enter the girls' locker room. My eyes find my target immediately, though there are dozens of girls rushing in every direction, some desperate to reach a shower stall and scrub away the feel of their own sweat, others tiny tornadoes whisking off their gym uniforms and throwing their clothes back on.

To my surprise, Kim Possible isn't a member of the first group. She stands without a sound in the center of the room, one foot propped on the bench in front of her as she unties her tennis shoe. Her face is streaked with sweat like everyone else's, sections of her red ponytail unraveling and trailing through it, but she only pushes them back with impatient hands. Hands that have dealt with far worse.

I wonder if she even broke a sweat defeating my father.

I walk to my locker and grab the lock to input the code. If I weren't still playing a believable teenage girl, I could slice through every single one of these locks with my mind, run off with anything I wanted to.

The thought is a pleasant burst of heat in my chest. I wave to Kim and duck into a shower stall, latching the door behind me. No one questions my modesty. They believe I'm hiding an awkward body or maybe a birthmark - not a slim mechanical zipper where my spine should be, the indentations on either side where my thermo-controls prevent me from overheating while also maintaining the illusion of a human body temperature, the hinge across my hips that allows them to rotate in a full circle.

From outside the stall, Kim sighs.

"I know Ron already asked this, but. . . _are _you all right, Kim?" My voice rings with sincerity, rises to the challenge of pretending I care about her.

"Well, now that you mention it," Kim says, "this year has gotten off to a less fabulous start than I was hoping for." The laugh she expels is not a cheerleader's; it is empty and trying not to be.

I press my eye to the crack. Kim glances over both shoulders before pulling her T-shirt over her head. Hesitation she wouldn't have shown on the first day of school. Progress.

"You mean, with Barkin and everybody?" I pause and weigh the odds of mentioning the cheer squad. I don't want to risk sounding smug. She needs to believe I am her friend, because Kim Possible is not afraid of any enemy.

As it turns out, I don't have to bring it up. "Yeah," Kim says. "Barkin. Busybodies. A cheer squad that doesn't take freshmen. Or so they _said_."

Bitterness corrodes her last word, and I watch through the crack as the sound of it frightens her.

I look down at my hands, and my voice comes out soft, hurt. "I'm sorry about that, Kim. I MAJORLY am. I asked them if you could join, too, but they told me not to push it." It is a lie, but so was everything else I have ever said to her. Why this one clings to the roof of my mouth when none of the others did is beyond my ability to explain.

"Oh, you're fine, Athena." Kim shimmies into a pair of capri pants with pockets barely big enough to hold a cell phone. "I mean, it tanks, but it's not your fault."

It is one hundred percent my fault.

"And on top of everything else" - Kim groans another heavy breath - "I found out on, like, the second day of school that this villain who hates my guts, Dr. Drakken, just got busted out of prison."

My legs startle at his name, and I stop myself just before I collide with the wall. That name shouldn't mean anything to me, should not stand for someone I love, someone I have vowed to protect, someone whose vengeance built me. I shouldn't even know who Dr. Drakken is.

For the first time I doubt my ability to give a convincing performance. My neural processors that stimulate a nervous system have stalled, grown hot. It will surely bleed through if I try to speak.

But Shego taught me that the most effective lies are the ones that peel away from the truth only as much as they have to. That, she said, is one reason why Dr. Drakken is such a bad liar - he concocts outlandish, bizarre stories that are so far apart from what really happened, or even what could have happened, that no one will believe him.

I take a breath so I can see my chest expand. "Dr. Drakken? Isn't that the guy you busted last summer?"

As soon as the words are out, my body stiffens. Preparing. She will dissect my father now, and it will be brutal. I will have to keep myself from knocking her to the floor.

"Very same guy, yeah. Turned out he'd somehow gotten hold of some pretty warped mind-control technology and was using it to build brainwashing machines he was going to sell as hair dryers - you know, the old-fashioned head-clamp types you see at salons? Like THAT was gonna happen. But we definitely couldn't risk such ferociously powerful technology being in the hands of some wacko villain like Drakken, so Ron and I showed up at his place and took him down. Ended up having to tear the wires out of his master computer. The whole lair burned down. I think he's still tweaked at me for it."

Her voice is wrong when she talks about him. It does not fit with her track record, with the profile downloaded onto my internal hard drive.

"You hate him," I say. I'm not sure if it's a statement or a question, but I know it comes out in an even, natural tone, and I'm glad she can't see my face, which proves harder to pull back under my control.

Through the crack in the door I watch Kim shrug and blink. "Nah. Not really."

"Why not?" I say.

"I know I've only been in the crime-fighting biz for, what? A year and a half? Sheesh, I have no idea if I'd know 'true evil'"- Kim puts finger quotes around the words - "when I see it. But, so far, I don't see it in Drakken. He's more of a wannabe."

Fury should stir in my circuits, except her voice is still wrong. It is not composed of hatred or even revulsion. There is disdain there, to be sure, but it is bundled in something different, gentler. It is as if I reached out my hand, grabbed her, and found her to be made of dust and feathers rather than flesh and bone.

"What _do _you see in him?" I say, and not just because it is the next question a friend would ask. Because I need to know.

"Anger. And sadness under that," Kim says. "He reminded me of a little kid throwing some giant tantrum because nobody was paying enough attention to him. He had this way of breathing all funny whenever something didn't go his way, and he told me the entire plan like I was supposed to clap for him or something. I mean, sure, he talked an awful lot about wanting to destroy me or feed me to his sharks, but you know what? He never looked me in the eye when he did. I'd bet that if it came right down to it, he couldn't do it. And when his lair went up in flames - he actually cried. TBH - I kinda feel sorry for him." She swings her red hair back with a toss of her head. "Does that make any sense?"

"Yeah," I say. Once again, I'm glad she can't see my face, because it is twisting, breaking, hurting.

It makes total sense. It is a perfect description of my father.

The only thing that doesn't make sense is the fact that she said it.

* * *

The bell rings, and I trail Kim and Ron out of last period, stopping to wave at a few of the other kids who follow me around now, as if my abrupt success could be contagious. Right on cue, just as we pass the lockers, Kim's handheld computer beeps insistently from her wrist. I lean in closer, tilt my head as if I don't know already know who is calling, let alone the message he will have for her and the exact latitude and longitude of our destination.

"Go, Wade," Kim says.

The young boy with the close-cut curls leans forward. "Kim, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, buuuut. . . . Shego just broke into the Upperton Biology Research Lab."

I ask what I am supposed to - "Shego?" I remember her dripping sweat and her clenched teeth as we fought on the floor of the junky lair, and something unpleasant, something I don't recognize, boots up inside me. It feels wrong, detrimental somehow, to pretend I'm unfamiliar with her.

"She's Drakken's henchman. Or hench-girl or whatever the word would be," Ron says from over Kim's shoulder.

Kim doesn't glance up from the screen. "Right. But if you ask me, she's the _real _brains of the operation."

The cameras in my body are one-way, but I know that on the other side of them, Drakken's anger clogs the room like smoke.

"And she's a real knockout. In more ways than one," Ron says. His eyes look stricken, an uneasy mixture of infatuation and fear. I creep away from him. "She's the one who broke Drakken out of prison, isn't she?"

"You better believe it," Wade says from the computer. His fingers run across his keyboard, faster even than Drakken's can go. "And since biological laboratories aren't usually Shego's taste, then -"

" - whatever she's stealing must be for him," Kim finishes. She does look up from the screen then. Intensity blossoms on her face, hardens and shadows it. I get my first glimpse of the girl who brought my father to his knees.

I press back against a locker.

"Bingo!" Wade turns a chubby thumb up for Kim.

"Natch." Kim pulls her fingers through her hair and lets it drop back into its perfect side-part. "We'll be right there, Wade."

No hesitation. Not a moment of indecision.

I log into the web search in my mind and input _sincere, compassionate_, studying the expressions that spring up. "When you say 'we', you don't just mean you and Ron, do you?" I say. I let my lips turn down a fraction; any farther would be a pout, and that is not what I am going for.

"Um, yeah!" Kim bursts out and then slaps her hand onto her forehead. "Sorry, Athena, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. It's just. . . I don't want to put you in any danger."

The unpleasantness scratches inside me again like a virus, scrambling my programming, running wet fingers across my reason for existence.

"I wouldn't be in danger," I say in all sincerity. "I know how to fight, too." I sound like a secret agent who carries out clandestine missions every day. Because that is what I am.

If I am anything at all.

I don't understand where that thought comes from.

Kim opens her mouth and leaves it open, her eyes prowling across the halls. I know what I see in _her _then: She is a wild animal hunched over a kill, riveted on another animal that has stepped onto her claimed hunting grounds, her claws sheathed in hopes she won't have to use them but no plans to surrender.

In that moment, I pity her. If she can find it in herself to pity my father, then why should I, created to outperform her, not be able to feel the same for her?

"Athena -" she says.

"KP, come on! Three against one? Shego wouldn't have a chance!" Ron cries, waving the arms too long for his body, and in a blink I can see Drakken's arms doing the same. Ron rests a hand on Kim's wrist and looks at her, through her. I hear him whisper, "Please."

He is the game warden who doesn't want to have to break up a fight.

He is also a younger version of my father.

Kim sighs and lifts her chin. "Okay. Athena, you're totally welcome to come if your parents are okay with it."

The irony sparks all the way down to my CPU.

"I can check with them," I say slowly. I slide my cell phone from my pocket, wrap my fingers tightly around its outdated surface. "Hang on just a sec."

When Kim nods at me, I head outside and make a right turn, crouching behind the wall where she found me the day the plan went into action. I lift the phone, flip it open. My finger freezes right before it touches the button. If Wade has access to the security footage at the Upperton Biology Research Lab, then he could certainly find his way into Shego's phone history. That link could bring down all three of us.

I pull the phone up to my ear without pressing a single key, tucking it behind my new, chic purple braid. "Hi, Mom, it's me." I neither shout nor whisper - shouting will sound too much like I am trying to be overheard, whispering too much like I have something to hide. "Um, you know how I mentioned Kim Possible and I are friends now? Well, the Upperton Biology Research Lab just got broken into, and she says I can come with her to check it out if it's okay with you."

I pause, the timer in my head counting down from forty-five seconds. When it reaches zero, I squeal, "Really? Thanks, Mom, you're the best! Okay. Yeah. I promise I'll be super-careful." I pause again. My throat scrunches around the words. "Love you too," I say to no one, and drop my phone back into my pocket. Skip back into the school.

The accusing overhead light burns my eyes in a way I didn't know could happen to me.

* * *

The Upperton Biology Research Lab turns out to be even darker and more enormous than I would have imagined it to be. Its boxy shape makes a symmetrical cut into the evening sky, its windows tinted like they are hiding knowledge from people who can't handle it. My father would be very proud of that thought.

I think of him now as I gaze around the wide perimeter of this building, its darkness, its secrets, its dignity. The ceilings, I notice immediately, have high enough peaks that someone could almost fly a small airplane from the entrance straight to the exit. Silently, I vow to secure this place for him as soon as I can. I imagine him hunched over to avoid our dumpy lair's low roof, shivering and pulling his sleeves as he does; it is the least he deserves.

It isn't hard to locate Shego's entrance point. Just as we planned, she shattered a side door's glass with her plasma, reached through and turned the knob, and swung the latch back into place an inch from closing. Kim and Ron, in their confidence, will see it as careless.

Kim gives the door a push with her shoulder and almost smirks when it swings open. She steps into the purple-black void beyond, with me beside her and Ron behind us, making noises as if he is trying not to whimper. Aside from that, and from our shoes scuffing across the floor, glass crunching beneath, the room is disturbingly quiet for a lab that I know works with live animals. Kim flicks on her flashlight, and in its beam I see a slick-furred rabbit brooding in one corner of a narrow wire cage, blinking at us with fire-red eyes. It is three times larger than any rabbit in my databanks.

Ron shrieks and leaps behind Kim. "Vampire bunny!" he cries, pointing to the rabbit's incisors, which do look sharper than the average rabbit's.

"Read _Bunnicula _too many times much?" Kim replies, her voice a hiss. "This is just some poor, experimented-on bunny."

Ron straightens and coughs. The sound is several octaves too high to be mistaken for Drakken's, but I hear him in it anyway.

I smile at Ron. "It _is _pretty spooky in here, though, isn't it?"

While their eyes adjust to the dark, I switch on night-vision mode and crank my auditory receptors up to full capacity. I hear and see exactly what I hoped, exactly what I needed - the steady dripping of water into an aquarium tank six feet tall, long skinny shapes flicking around inside it. I can't quite make out the writing on their tag, but I do see the phosphorescent lightning bolts that decorate it. The reward center in my brain floods with light.

Kim's hand finds mine and gives it a reassuring squeeze. It reminds me that I am playing my role perfectly. The glow in my reward center flashes on and off a few times, and then it flickers back on, dimmer.

The room we walk through is wide and deep and black enough to swallow us whole. My infrared scanners show me a sweep of destruction. Overturned file cabinets. Test tube shards strewn in all directions, their jagged edges still dripping with whatever serum they contained. Microscopes knocked carelessly from desks to crack open on the floor.

All unnecessary, of course. All engineered to make Shego's search for the Biometric Power Converter look frantic.

Beside me, Kim keeps one hand in mine and rummages through her backpack with the other. Behind us, Ron edges to the side, bumping around for the wall. His foot finds a hefty object on the floor instead, and he falls in a shower of dirt. "I'm okay," he says, whispering too loudly. When he stands up again, his pants are heaped around his ankles, pale-fleshed legs exposed beneath a pair of glossy polka-dotted shorts.

"Stealthy as ever." Kim rolls her eyes as Ron yanks his pants back up, a red shine clinging to his freckled cheeks. "Let's see. . . here we go." From her backpack, she pulls three pairs of what I recognize to be night-vision goggles, designed to mimic Club Banana's most fashionable and expensive sunglasses. "Good thing I brought a spare," she says.

It is a good thing, I think as I accept the lenses I don't need, slip them on, and pretend that they have improved my view of the room. Otherwise Kim might wonder how I moved with such ease through this room devoid of light.

Beside me, Ron sighs the way the sprockets in my spine do when I power down for the night. "Ahhh. That's better, much better. . . Uh-oh."

He stares at his foot, which is buried up to the ankle in reddish soil, and turns to gawk at the object that tripped him, a terrarium that must have also been six feet high when it stood upright. Now it lies tipped on its side. Its glass isn't shattered, but the bottom pane has pulled loose from the framework, and now some animal's habitat leaks onto the floor.

Realization dawns on Ron's face in panic. "Oh, dude. Oh, man. Oh, dude, I am so sorry." He scoops up a handful of dirt and tosses it back into the terrarium.

Something squeaks from inside the glass.

Kim tenses. I don't move. My audio-recognition software identifies the sound as belonging to a rodent, a small chewing mammal which Drakken is afraid of and Shego and I are not.

Even I am surprised by the creature that crawls out of the terrarium, shaking soil from its head. It is short, no longer than the palm of a hand, fat like a fresh can of soda, and pink. Like Ron's legs, it is mostly skin and very little hair; only a set of wiry whiskers fan out from its nose.

I look at Ron, expecting the boy who shrieked at the sight of a rabbit to leap and flee the room to get away from what is easily the ugliest creature I have ever seen.

He doesn't. He bends down, sticks his hand out, and lets the rodent crawl into it. "Hey, buddy," he says. "I'm so sorry Shego trashed your pad, man. And I know I just trashed it further, and I'm even sorrier about that. You forgive me?"

The rodent responds by shoving its head against Ron's fingertips, as though it wants to be petted. He obliges it. I almost expect the rodent's paper-thin skin to rip away at his touch, but the creature actually shuts its eyes, its breathing blissful.

Kim takes a hesitant glance at the rodent in Ron's hand. "What is that - that freaky thing?" she stutters.

"I'm not a hundred percent sure," Ron says. He turns to me. "Do you know, Athena?"

Of course I do. I have already snapped a picture and uploaded it to my photo-matching program; the results are in before Ron's lips have stopped moving. "I think that's a naked mole rat," I say.

Kim squats beside the wrecked terrarium and blows dust off the bronze plaque. She nods. "Yep. Naked Mole Rat - 1 Specimen."

I frown at the stacks of information organizing themselves in my brain. "But there's something I don't understand. Naked mole rats are REALLY super-vulnerable to cold. Without other mole rats, they'll freeze to death."

"Genetic experimentation lab, remember?" Kim tilts her head in the direction of Ron's new companion. "Whatever they did to this little guy must have toughened him up."

I feel stupid for not realizing this first, and Kim watches me with smugness that looks quite comfortable to have returned as she crosses her arms over her chest. Although no mike connects us, I can hear my father in my head just as clearly, blaring at me: _See? This is what she always does! This is how it always feels! Don't you SEE, Athena?_

His frustration ebbs down into me, which is the way it should be. I am built to carry it; he is not. I step away from Kim and feel the chill of my metal skeleton, reminding me that the softness slathered on top is only an act of trickery.

"My name's Ron," Ron says to the naked mole rat.

It gives a terse squeak.

"Dude, he said my name!" Ron tugs at Kim's close-fitting sleeve. "Did you not hear 'Ron' in that?"

Kim and I exchange eye rolls, the mechanics in my jaw straining.

"What's _your _name, buddy?" Ron continues.

The mole rat shrugs. Even I don't miss it. It actually shrugs.

"Well, of _course _they didn't give you a name. Duh - you were just a 'specimen' to them." Ron's eyebrows tug downward. In this attempt to look threatening, he resembles my father more than ever, something that does not change when he breaks into a grin. "I'm gonna call you - Rufus!"

"Rufus? As in imaginary-friend-in-preschool Rufus?" Kim looks amused.

"Don't laugh, KP. Rufus and I had some great times together!"

"Okay. But. Ron." Kim's fingers glide back through her hair, tucking strands into place behind her ears. "You can't just walk off with their naked mole rat. That's stealing."

Ron waves his hand, indicating the broken terrarium and its spill of dirt. "Hello! No home anymore! I'll just give Rufus a place to stay until they find a new one for him. That's okay, right, buddy? Right?"

I lean in, curious to see if the mole rat nods. That is where I am when a dark voice cuts in from the far wall, from the part of the room we haven't examined yet.

"Well, goody, now you've got a little foursome," it says. "How nice. Too bad you're not squaring off against Killigan at the Putt-Putt Palace."

All of us, the mole rat included, whip around to take in the tall figure striding toward us. Her walk is casual yet practiced, as if she has done this so many times and is not afraid of being interrupted this time. The fingers of one hand clasp a small, triangular object with blue flecks of paint on it. The others are held perfectly straight and glowing, like candles with plasma for wicks.

I jerk, and my gaze collides with Shego's. Hers is flat and luminescent as a fresh coat of paint.

Color seeps out of Ron's face. I watch as every slim muscle in Kim's body goes rigid. Her eyes burn, but not with fear. I review "terror" in my head and force my mouth to fall open. I am not supposed to know this woman.

And for a moment, with her face shadowed by the flames of her own making, I'm not sure I do.

She neither hurries nor dawdles, using the walk of one who commands when this event starts and stops. Her eyes skate over the four of us, and no glint of recognition appears when they find me. Her expression is blank, as though her hard drive has been erased. My creator, the one who declined to be referred to as family, is good at this. She looks. . . bored.

Hatefully bored.

Her mouth cuts open to speak. "Well, well, fancy meeting you here, Kimmy. Guess you never got that growth spurt - or that wardrobe makeover."

The girl I have watched cower in the presence of a sophomore draws herself up in front of Shego, a straight, skinny pole. "Says the person still wearing a _jumpsuit_," she says.

Shego's smile is frozen. "Hey, if it works, why mess with it?"

"You lost me at 'if it works,'" Kim shoots back.

I try to crank my night vision up even higher so I can see which of the two young women is shorter, which one has the red tint to her hair, which one I am only pretending to be loyal to. Right now, with their feet spread to span their hips and their eyelids drooping to a place of insincerity, they appear identical.

Shego's snicker transforms into what my databanks tell me is called a _war cry _as she launches her body at Kim. Kim crosses her arms in front of her face, shifts her weight back to her ankles. My friend disappears, reminding me that she is no more real than the invisible boy Ron played with in preschool. This is the girl who wants to destroy our dreams and lock my father away, separate from everything but his own nightmares.

I know he has nightmares; many mornings I power up to find his bedsheets tangled, his eyes red and cagey, his hands shaking.

Right before Shego would land on her, Kim pulls to the side, leaving Shego with no target except the floor. She sails over Kim's head and catches herself on one long, limber leg. Her jaw tenses, resisting the pain.

They are twenty feet away from the eel tank, which is exactly how it looked on Drakken's display panel back at the lair. A digital keypad sits beside its door, an old-fashioned latch on the opening backing it up.

Shego pivots and lunges back toward the center of the room. Kim waits there. Ferocity seeps out of her like cheap perfume. Ferocity and satisfaction. This is the first time all day anything has gone right for her.

Ten feet away from the eel tank.

Kim shoves out a leg and swipes both of Shego's out from under her. Shego grunts as she collapses.

I flinch and hope Kim doesn't notice.

Shego barely allows herself to touch the floor before turning and firing three bolts of plasma directly into Kim's stomach. Kim is flung backward, her neck arcing in pain or fury or shock. She lands hard on her rear end, and I see the impact reverberate through her wiry arms.

I flinch and hope Shego doesn't notice.

Shego picks her way through the glass and dirt to stand beside Kim, five feet from the eel tank. She squats so that her nose almost touches Kim's, and now Shego is the one brimming with ferocity and satisfaction. But there is something else there, too, something that falls over Shego's face like a stark shadow.

"Gee, Princess, that was quite the tumble you took there," she says. Her tone is sweet and fake, even more devastating than sarcasm. "Look, if you wanna call the whole thing off and walk away, I'll give you the chance." Shego nods to the handheld computer hanging halfway off Kim's wrist. "Why don't you call your daddy and have him come pick you up?"

What Shego would do if Kim did stand up and leave, I have no clue. And it doesn't matter. All three of us know Kim would never do that.

Instead, she pushes up a few inches off the ground, supporting herself with one wrist. Her other hand strikes out and grabs Shego's close-fitting collar and wrenches downward, cracking Shego's face against the floor. "No, thanks," Kim says.

A bionic surge that I have to ignore tightens my limbs.

An ugly hiss rises from Shego's limp form. She claws her way up from the ground and plants herself in Kim's path, a hand lit with plasma on either side of Kim. Kim is only forced backward a few steps before she realizes she can duck beneath Shego's arms without being hit, but those few steps are all we need.

Two feet from the eel tank.

I am in Shego's sights now. She doesn't make eye contact or nod - she is too smart for that - but a spark leaps between us anyway, transmitting from one half of the brain to the other. It has begun.

Just like we rehearsed.

Shego throws a punch toward Kim's head. Kim bends herself in half, and Shego's ignited fist strikes square in the center of the keypad. It beeps and shrieks in protest as its plastic covering melts away, dripping down the glass, baring a severed mess of wiring and circuitry. Broken and bleeding. I grimace at the sight.

This whole fight can't have taken more than a minute, and Ron has spent that entire minute crouched beside the overturned terrarium, blinking and useless, a printer without paper. Now he creeps out from his hiding place and, still on his knees, circles around Shego before jumping up and lunging for her from behind. He does not look lovestruck anymore. "WOYA-HOYA!" he cries.

Shego drops him with an elbow to the chest and takes another step toward Kim. He lies crumpled. Directly behind Kim.

That is my cue. I run toward Shego, my hands clenched in front of me, my body between hers and Kim's. "Leave her alone!" I say in the voice I have been practicing: protective, rescuing. The last thing Kim needs to hear right now.

"Wait - who are you?" Shego says.

She grabs my arm and rolls it behind my back, then heaves me up against the glass of the tank. The cold bites my cheek. Her grip is sharper still. "Look, it's pretty cute what devoted little friends you all are," she hisses, releasing me. "Cute - but definitely not good for you." She turns and drives another kick into Kim's side.

I stand up slowly and brace myself on the tank's wall. Feigning dizziness, I grope forward, hands out. One of them brushes against the latch, and I lean forward and slip it out of place.

Ron still groans from the floor like Shego ran him through, the mole rat licking his ear. I take a few staggering steps away from the tank, my hands pressed to my forehead as if I don't know where I'm going or why I'm going there. In truth, I am following a course superimposed over my vision, a projector slide between my eyes and the scene playing out before me, my every move denoted with simulated footprints and flashing red lights. I am getting out of the way.

So many things in my brain are aglow or sputtering that I can't even locate my reward center.

I hit the edge of a desk and half-spin, squinting at Kim and Shego the way a human would to bring blurry figures into focus. My translucent projection of the next step in our plan merges effortlessly with what I see in front of me.

Shego coming for Kim again, her head lowered, her hands poised to burn a hole in Kim's bare belly. Kim rocking backward, hinging her balance on her calf muscles, ready to back-flip out of the way.

A nanosecond before she can escape, the plasma switches off. Shego's head rears up to catch Kim beneath the chin. The heels of her hands spring onto Kim's shoulders and send Kim reeling, unprepared, with no time to break her fall.

I watch Kim Possible's perfect red lips part, two lashes of frustration across her face, as she trips over her friend and grabs the back of his shirt. They are the last thing I see of her before the two of them break through the tank's door and fall down its long steel throat to land with a splash in its belly.

Thick silence swamps the room.

A few muffled words as Ron reaches into the water and comes up holding an electric eel in each hand.

And then Kim makes a noise.

I had locked my programming tight in expectation of a scream that would blare like an alarm and split the air in two. I was prepared for her screaming. I had even waited in excitement for it.

But not for this noise - a sharp droplet of sound, choked off before it can become a scream, fear trickling out the sides as it struggles to retain its shape.

"Electric _eels_? You can't be SERIOUS! Ron, there's - there's gotta be a way - another way out!" I can hear Kim clutching her bravery tight because she will be no one, she will be nothing if she lets it go.

She will become Drakken, absorbed and ignored by all but the meanest excuses for human beings. It terrifies her.

I can't smile. It would blow my cover.

"No need for scream, KP." Ron's voice, cheery and persuasive, bursts through the glass. "We'll be all right."

"Looks like it's just you and me, New Girl," says a voice behind me. I recognize it, and yet I don't.

Shego spins me around to look straight into my face. Part of me wants to run to her, to huddle with this girl who used to roll her eyes with me over my father's failed attempts at coolness, to confide in her how confused I suddenly feel.

But that girl isn't here anymore. I search her perfect pale features and see no sign of her. The edges of Shego's lips flick upward, and the amusement is sincere, but it doesn't look like a smile. Her beautiful emerald eyes are harsh, unrelenting, drowning out the dry wit I love so much.

A hand smacks against the tank from the inside. Sensible mid-length nails painted peach. Tiny nimble fingers. A palm that should be strong and calloused from fighting so many bad guys, but is somehow rough and soft at the same time. That hand squeezed mine the first day. That hand squeezed mine twenty minutes ago. And how she described my father - the only kind words I have ever heard anyone say about him -

"Kim!" Her name jumps out of my mouth before I can pinpoint how it got in there.

I wrench free from Shego and run toward the tank's entrance, grappling for the door I can barely see with so many lights dancing and buzzing and going out in my brain. It feels like my synthetic skin is being pared away with a knife, exposing what I truly am underneath. I have to rely on Shego's hatred being stronger than my confusion.

And I know I can when I hear Kim call, "Athena, look out!"

Shego grabs me from behind, pins me to the wall. My respiration-mimicry software lets out a hard huff of air. It only effects a realistic response, that is all; I should not feel as if I have actually lost something.

". . . are actually real gentle if you handle 'em right. . ." Ron again.

I glance at Shego. The readings emitting from her eyes don't match what I can feel mine putting out.

"Athena!" Kim catches her breath, but I hear it stumble. "Athena, let her leave! It's not worth it!"

Blue streaks spark in the water. She is locked in a cage with the only thing she fears, and she is still worried for me.

I clutch that thought and turn it over on its back. On its underside I glimpse what Drakken has always glimpsed:

She doesn't think I stand a chance against Shego. She thinks she is the only real hero.

The desire to prove her wrong nearly shatters my programming. I have to pause and refresh our goal in my mind. If I take Shego down now, Drakken will need to revise his plan, and Dr. Drakken is not good at revising.

"No, Kim!" I call back. "Let me do this for you! I want to help you!" The lie is comfortable, familiar; I fit inside it.

"Lemme guess. This your first mission?" Shego's laughter is a weapon she points at me with deadly accuracy. "Well, welcome to the real world, kid. As much as you'll see of it." She lifts a flaming hand.

That sound from Kim again.

I really wish she'd quit making that sound.

This time, Ron screams with her. He may not be afraid of electric eels, but he is afraid of my - of Shego.

Shego throws a punch. It lands a millimeter from my head and boils off the wall's finish. I clutch the goal tighter and tighter. Of course Shego would never really hurt me, but just the fact that she made me forget that for a fraction of a second makes the circuits in my wrists throb. Logic tells me I am frightened.

I have never felt fright before.

"Look, you know you can't beat me by yourself," Shego says, even though we're both aware I can. I'm simply not allowed to. Maybe this is what she meant.

I stare her straight in the face. A bruise buds on her stainless skin from being smashed into the floor. I make sure she can see the resolve in my eyes even though it is counterfeit and she knows it.

"Maybe not. But I'm sure going to have a good time trying." My words ring in the room. I am Kim Possible: the upgrade.

Shego sneers until I bring one leg up and lodge it between her ribs. I push at half-force, which sends her only ten feet across the room. She skids another yard or two before sinking her fingers into the floor and stopping herself. With the smallest of flinches.

I have hurt her and it pains me, too. I want this to be over; I want this to be the end of it, but Drakken and Shego will need more security camera footage of Kim's meltdown. I look back over my shoulder at the eel tank. Kim has pressed herself against the farthest wall, her eyes bulging.

The lights in my brain go haywire again.

Shego runs toward me, swinging her arms. As soon as she is within reach, I grab her by both wrists before she has the chance to activate her plasma. I could crush them now; I could destroy them; but instead I flop sideways, face clenched, as though I am barely keeping my hold on her.

"Give that back!" I cry. "Whatever that is, it isn't yours!"

"O-kay," Shego says. "Still not accustomed to the real world yet, huh, kid?"

She pulls one hand free and makes a dive for me. I release her other hand before she can find me, startling her backward, and crawl under the desk.

Shego tips the desk over with one push, exposing me.

The world has become a soundless void. No doubt, Kim still hollers my name, and I can see Shego's chest drifting in and out with her fury. I simply can't process them anymore. I grab Shego's ankle and give it a tug.

With another kick, Shego sends me to the floor. I lie still for a moment, pretending to be dazed, but really I am watching as Shego scales straight up the shelves of a bookcase that stands beside the only security camera she made sure not to destroy. "Hey, Kimmy!" she calls down. "Your friend here's got spunk. And she's good." She leans her weight subtly onto the ankle I didn't touch. "Matter of fact, I'd say she might even be a little better than you."

I don't look at Kim. I can imagine how she reacts to that.

From there, Shego vaults toward the ceiling, huddling in the notch in the corner that holds the security camera. In the process, she also slams her heels into the bookcase, knocking it to the floor. I gasp and jump out of the way before I can be flattened.

"How you gonna get to me now, huh?" Shego says. She straightens and stands there, one foot balanced on each half of a split beam behind the camera that keeps it in place.

I don't answer her. I focus instead on the words she said this morning - _I'll leave the broom in the corner closest to the eel tank._

That is where I find it. The handle scrapes against my palms, but it doesn't hurt. I clutch it and get a running start, my trajectory and velocity calculated before my first step lands. My feet never touch the back of the bookcase, only the broom handle. My hands graze the front end of it. Then the back. And then I am flying through the air. Letting my legs swim. Grabbing and landing.

Crowding out Shego, who has to dangle from the last two inches of the beam by her bladed gloves. She growls at me.

Our eyes meet over the beam. The look she gives me is significant, and it remembers what we agreed upon earlier today, before I left for school: _As soon as the broom trick is over, it ends._

"Wow, the judges give you a ten for form." Shego swings an arm over the beam and hooks on. Her fingertips shine green. "But nice girls only get so far."

I shut my eyes and pull up my firewall.

The blast of plasma hits me square in the center of my stylish new purple top, and I smell singed fabric as I drop through the air. Above me, Shego snorts. I fall and flail, twisting my body just enough to land in a chair so that its padding cushions the blow that would break mere ivory bones. I lie half on and half off, letting my face slacken.

"Athena!" Kim's and Ron's shouts would burst my heart if I had one.

Shego resumes her position on the beam and leers down at me. I am defeated. We are triumphant. She tears the top off the camera and tucks the disc into the pouch she wears on one leg. Kim and Ron will think that she took it just to avoid incriminating herself, but I know that disc isn't going to be burned up or melted down.

It's going to go straight to my father.

"Nice try, kids," Shego calls down to us. "Why don't you go back to your homework before you fail algebra, too?"

Without so much as a rustle of her long hair, she leaps away, disappearing into the twilight.

My brain goes cold. Dark.

I push myself out of the chair and stagger over to Kim's backpack. Her grappling hook sits inside, and the futile light winks off its shining red surface, glaring at me. I drag my feet in the direction of the eel tank, lift the opening, and fire the hook straight down into the darkness. It plops into the water, and Kim reaches in to retrieve it. I can see the confidence returning to her set face as she wedges the hook between the glass plates and begins the climb.

Minutes later, she and Ron collapse at my feet, panting, their pants soaked and clinging to them, the grappling hook still in Kim's hands. Kim rises and hugs me. I wasn't expecting that, and I go rigid in the embrace.

"Athena, thank you, like, a zillion times over!" she cries. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I think so. Embarrassed." I let my hidden heat lamps redden my cheeks. "But okay. You?"

"Same. Embarrassed and okay." Her rough, soft hand closes around my arm. "Ron?"

Ron gives us a thumb's-up. "All good, KP! And, also, great news: I kept Rufus safe!" He pulls his arms away from his chest to reveal the naked mole rat, shivering against his turtleneck. "He definitely isn't gonna wanna stay here tonight. I vote I take him home."

Kim sighs. She does not have the strength to argue with him. Panic exhausts her, I can tell; it is so foreign to her.

"Dude, I always wanted a pet," Ron says.

"Dad's got FIERCE animal-dander allergies," Kim whispers to me. She nods toward the hairless creature. "Looks like that won't be a problem with this one."

I can feel her pull back slightly after that, try to put her pride back on. For a minute, I am sure she feels the electrical current humming through my body. But she manages to smile, a thin line, at me. Whatever she has experienced, she does not want to take it out on me.

She likes me. She has no idea what is buried beneath my lifelike flesh, who put it there. If she did, what would she do?

I am less certain about that than I was before I met her.

* * *

Despite the junky disarray of Drakken's lair, I have always felt a thrill come over me when I descend the crumbling steps, like I am stepping into an electrical current, gaining more power. Today, for the first time, it brings discomfort, cinching around me where a real girl's rib cage would be. It puzzles me, and as the trap doors clap shut against the lilac-hued clouds, something inside of me closes too.

Until I see Drakken skipping up to greet me, shouting the whole way. His small feet hardly seem to touch the rough dirt floor. "Athena!" he cries. "Success!" His hands form fans on either side of his face and he beams at me from between them, softening the harsh angles of his cheekbones. He takes my hand and spins me around, and my reward center shines. "You were magnificent! Golden! Splendidrific!"

Only the first two of those are real words, but I don't tell him that. I have never seen such joy before. He grins so wide I can see past his tongue, down toward his throat. I find myself smiling in return before I even understand why.

"Our team scored?" I say. I blink, still keeping up the pretense of being human, and I see Kim's hand slamming against the glass, its palm white. I stare straight ahead, focusing on Drakken's chair and how it continues to rotate without him, but the image leaves an imprint on my optical circuits.

"Did we ever! World domination shall be within our grasp before you know it! Within months! Weeks, even - I don't know - have we gone into Daylight Savings Time yet?" He shakes his head. "Athena. . . I'm so proud of you." Drakken brushes his lips across my forehead and then holds me out at arm's length to study me. I call up pictures of proud fathers in my search bar; I can immediately see they are the same.

Unlike Kim, he knows who I am - _what _I am, and his love is true. It is there in the shimmer of his brilliant black eyes, the strangely youthful tilt of his head. Even with all he has done, all he is doing right now, there is a part of him that remains undisturbed by whatever shadowed places lurk inside him. I want to preserve it, to keep it separate from the darkness that surrounds us; I want it with everything in me. I let him fold his bony arms around me.

My CPU sighs. This is my father. How could I ever have thought anything more important than his happiness?

A laugh, hard and sharp, rises from behind Drakken. "Awww, how sweet. A little daddy-daughter bonding time?"

I pull back and watch Shego approach. She could be woven into the shadows, but the corners of her mouth turn up, no longer kept a secret from me. Her bruise matches the tint of the clouds. She wears it proudly, like an application of rouge.

"Way to go, kiddo," she says, and although her tone is flat, I know she means it; her gaze never moves from mine. "You kicked tail tonight. I mean, not _my _tail, but you get the point."

_Only because the plan would have failed if I did, _I think, but I don't say this either. The plan has already injured her once tonight. I don't want to add to that.

"I am amazing!" Drakken says, twirling in a circle.

Shego glares at him.

"We are amazing!" Drakken corrects himself. He executes another twirl and crashes into the wall before I can warn him. Pushing himself off the ground, he rubs his cheek, but the movement is absent, and the fire I always feel when he's in pain burns out. "Shego. . . did you get the footage?"

"You gotta work on your timeline, Doc. Definitely should have asked first and done the dance-like-a-maniac thing second." She rolls her eyes at me, and I roll mine back. "But, yeah, I got it."

Shego reaches into her leg pouch and slides out the smallest of compact discs. Even the lair's weak light bends to it and comes back brighter, draws out prismatic blocks of light on its shinier inner circle. Drakken squeals and clutches it to his chest.

I imagine what is on that disc, waiting to be awakened on its silver surface. Shots of Kim in the eel tank, from her head to the murky, sparking water that submerged her knees, perspectives I didn't get the chance to see during the fight. Splashes. Flailing limbs. The desire to save me still stronger even than the terror she must have felt. Coverage, defined and detailed, of her humiliation.

The humiliation I delivered to her.

I start to teeter inside and plant my heels into the ground. "So you've got actual video of Kim screaming?"

Except it wasn't screaming. It was that broken sound, the one that shut itself off at her command. That sound I hate so much.

"All on here, ladies!" Drakken holds the disc out to gaze at it like a long-lost friend. "Every last embarrassing second of it! It will be all over the Internet by morning!" He fills the lair with his chuckle. "Imagine the cruel memes."

I upload _pleasure _onto my face. And then, for a second, I can't move. I have never used deception on my creators. Not until now.

The odds are low that I would be able to sustain it, so I let it drop and scan my emotional desktop. Only one icon is not grayed out and smeared, and without stopping to identify it, I click on it. Resume an expression that is mine. Return myself to normal. "Is your face okay, Shego?"

"What, this litt -" Shego begins.

Drakken's voice breaks in, higher than it is supposed to be and shaking. "Shego? Did - did something happen to your face?" He rushes to her side, and his eyes fly all over her face as if it would destroy them to remain still.

Shego points to the bruise, and Drakken's eyebrow squirms.

"Not a big deal, Doc, really." Shego waves her hand. "It's Kimmy's work, and that girl has all the strength of a gnat."

"She thinks she's all that. . . but she's not!" Drakken spits. His fists double and then slide around behind his back, where I watch his fingers worry. "We should probably get some RICE on that."

"Annnnd how exactly is rice gonna help us?" Shego says.

Drakken parks his hands on his narrow hips. "Not rice the food, RICE the acronym. R.I.C.E. It stands for - oh, let's see. Radium! Ice! Compression! And. . . evildoing!"

At least this is a question I can pose to my search bar. I have gleaned the correct information before Shego can even get her mouth open. "Actually, it stands for Rest, Ice, Compression Bandage, and Elevation. And it usually treats sprained or torn ligaments - not face bruises."

Shego gives Drakken a sour look. "Yeah, I'm never coming to you for medical advice, Dr. Miscellaneous."

Drakken turns pink, a few patches of skin at a time, and mutters beneath his breath, but neither one lasts long. The bristles smooth from his hair and it swings in glee, the ends curving away from his shoulder blades. "Ah, but what are we standing around bickering for?" he says. "We've got to celebrate!"

He whips toward the refrigerator, and Shego takes the disc from him and places it with graceful care on the computer console. I see Kim trapped within its reflections, striking the glass, warning me away from an evil I already know about. An evil I belong to.

I am an interrupted string of code, my numbers corrupted, useless, frozen. I am a machine that has evolved beyond the need to charge, groaning as someone once again tries to force batteries into me.

Drakken turns and grins at me again, exuberance unseating the cruelty that I have seen romp through him. My reward center makes a noise, but that is all. I remember the horrified blush on his blue cheeks and try to move it to Kim's peachy cheeks, but it looks just as wrong on her.

I switch to a different processing strand, try to imagine my father in prison. His head down, his body quivering. Alone. No trace of light or life in his eyes, the lids clenched together. Once again, I want to construct a fort around him, shelter him from any harm, any fear, anything that comes to steal his fragile peace.

His eyes are so kind.

_"Athena." I will never get Kim out of my head; I wish I could delete her. "Everything's going to be okay."_

She told me that on the first day of school, and she was right. Everything will be okay - for me. She never once considered that things could fall apart on her.

Arrogant. And selfless.

I follow Shego across the room, staring at the moss growing along the far wall. No matter where I go from here, it will be a betrayal of someone I care about.


	8. Memes

**~Hi, everyone! This one took a while. **

**Inspired by a single line in the movie - Drakken, commenting on the electric eel footage, muses, "Imagine the cruel memes." It was one of the few moments in the movie where he sounded like cartoon-Drakken. Still, I couldn't help thinking that cartoon-Drakken wouldn't have been content to wait for cruel memes to spring up on their own. . . **

**And this was born.~**

Kim Possible screamed.

Dr. Drakken grinned as he punched the "replay" button for the sixteenth time - or maybe the sixtieth. He'd long since lost track. Whatever the count, he knew he would never tire of seeing his teen nemesis backed up against glass, her face terror-pale, her eyes thunderstruck.

Such a strange word, _thunderstruck_. Everyone knew thunder didn't actually strike. That was the lightning's job. The thunder just tagged along behind, sound unable to catch up to light.

Drakken shifted in his seat and rubbed a hand across his stomach, still satiated and sloshy from the half-gallons of milk he'd chugged in celebration. Lost track of just how many of those, too. It didn't matter, though. The only thing that _mattered_ was that he not lose track of his capital-P Plan, because that track was going to carry Kim Possible straight to the gates of Humiliation Nation.

That was what she'd said to him right before she'd ripped out the heart of his Salon Brainwasher-and-Dryer and destroyed his lair. "Okay, fine," she'd said. "If you WANT to buy a one-way ticket to Humiliation Nation, that's not MY problem." She'd grinned as she said it, too, a neatly-folded-back grin, not the slightest bit ashamed of the silver stretching across her teeth. She was good with words, that girl - good enough to push them inside you, all the way into your soul, where they banged around and did grievous damage. Drakken had had so much he wanted to growl at her in return, but everything evaporated as soon as it reached his tongue, and then condensed, and then drifted elsewhere in the wind to rain down on someone luckier.

There had been a streak of motion, and then Drakken had been on the floor with Kim Possible kneeling in the center of his achy back to keep him down. The girl was about the size of a fencepost - she shouldn't have been strong enough to take him down! Not that he was exactly an iron-pumper, but still. . .

The next thing Drakken had known, he was being hauled to his feet and placed in a policeman's unbreakable grip. Kim Possible stood in the background, talking far too casually with another officer. Her face was satisfied with an overtone of saccharine, the primadonna ballerina receiving the blue ribbon she never once doubted she'd have by the end of the day. The spice of her red hair had burned in Drakken's contacts like paprika itself.

If he had known that it was going to be the last spot of color to visit his world for over a year, he might have taken longer to soak it in. Drakken gulped against the nausea clambering up the back of his throat - nausea that he suspected had nothing to do with all the milk and everything to do with the image of himself hunched over in a narrow glass cell, kenneled like a dog, cold air biting places his ponytail should have been guarding.

He would have that child's self-esteem for it if it were the last thing he ever did.

(Hopefully, it wouldn't have to be.)

Drakken re-re-re-re-rewatched as Kim Possible tumbled into the eel tank, surprise parting her lips, replacing the Captain Marvel expression she'd worn when she'd dived at - _doven _at? - Shego. She lifted a foot out of the water and Drakken saw her shoulders groan, probably lamenting the damage to the leather. . . or whatever state-of-the-art shoes were made from these days. He wriggled in anticipation of what was to come as Kim Possible reached into her pocket and came out with a micro-flashlight. Its beam bounced off some shiny plaque, highlighting words too small to read from the security camera's vantage point.

And then her gloved hands were all over every square inch of the glass, beating against it and expecting it to fold to her whims the way everything else she'd ever encountered before had. "Electric _eels_?" Kim Possible's voice rolled up to the top of the tank and splatted into the ceiling. "You can't be SERIOUS! Ron, there's - there's gotta be a way - another way out!"

The buffoon tried, in his cheery, buffoonish way, to reassure her. "Actually, I saw this documentary on electric eels a couple weeks ago when there was nothin' better on TV. And it turns out they're real gentle unless you threaten 'em."

But that was what Kim Possible did - threaten dangerous creatures who would otherwise have had no reason to harm her. The girl would have stuck her arm in a hornet's nest if she thought she could settle some silly waspish squabble and be hailed as a hero for it.

That was what made the Plan so capital-P Perfect. It was also what made it so torturous to wait, every second that ticked by giving Drakken a new intravenous shot of impatience. Patience was of the essence. And it was harder than waiting for molds to culture, harder than watching characters on soap operas mourn other characters that you as the viewer already knew weren't even dead.

"Athena!" The toughness was gone, though Drakken could still hear the girl reaching, scrambling for that spark that made her Kim Possible. "Get us out!"

The tank had fallen into shadow by then, but Drakken could make out the curve of Kim Possible's spine, the self-induced scoliosis that developed when a person found themselves locked behind glass with no way out. A lesser villain would have felt sorry for her. But prison had done to Drakken's ability to pity anyone what scientists speculated eons so far from the sun had done to Pluto's atmosphere - frozen it, dropped it to the surface to shatter, invalidated it.

Drakken shook his head back and forth, hoping to flick the memories away like dead skin cells. He craned an arm around to the back of his neck, inspecting the growth of his hair. It hadn't crept down to his collar, not long enough yet to pull back, but the ends swirled around his ears in protective little tufts, and that made things a little easier.

One look at the horror contorting Kim Possible's face, and he could no longer hold back the evil laugh that begged to be let free, the one he was considering having licensed to himself and himself alone. He'd been practicing it every day in prison. At least he presumed it was every day - sunset had no meaning in an Arctic prison, so he'd just tried to count off every three meals . . .

_No. FOCUS, Drakken. And not on prison!_

He trained his gaze on the screen once more and saw the buffoon lean down into the water and come up with an electric eel in each hand, still babbling a steady stream of goodwill. Kim Possible's chest heaved in and out, too fast, as if her lungs were rejecting what her airways tried to offer them. Her strangled scream almost drowned out the moment when Shego said, "Looks like it's just you and me, New Girl."

Athena gazed up at Shego owl-eyed. Drakken would have thought she looked afraid if he hadn't specifically closed off her every fear-conductor with his own two hands. Well, his own _one _hand - he needed the other to hold her head open so it wouldn't slam shut on his fingers. _Oooh_, car doors had _nothing _on robot skulls. . .

Kim's hands continued to bang-boom-biff against the glass. "Athena!" The name splintered, the name of a girl she considered to be her ally, a girl whose every move was in reality coordinated to help Shego come out on top. "Let her go! It's not worth it!"

"Oh, but it i-is," Drakken singsonged to the teenage meddler who couldn't hear him. He threw his head back and laughed again, ever more maniacally - had to do it; if he left it in his throat, it would have torn through, he was sure. The sound was low and full and sinister and delightful to the darkest corners of himself.

In the reflection in the screen, Drakken saw Shego roll her eyes. Let her. As helpful a sidekick as she was, she had never rightly appreciated the art of a good gloat, and even though she wasn't doing it now, nothing she could do could pop the party balloons boogieing inside Drakken. It was okay.

What _wasn't _okay was the look on Athena's face - puckered sharply around the nose and mouth as if she were fending off a dose of cod-liver oil. Drakken let his laughter die as he rocked his chair back to look at her. She seemed to be sinking into mousy-freshman programming that was never meant to be more than a brilliantly conceived farce.

"Do you think we could maybe - not watch this anymore?" Athena said, yanking on her tiny purple-dyed braid. Her own eyes rolled back so far Drakken expected to see them flip toward the ceiling. "I mean, I just _lived _it, like, an hour ago."

Now that Drakken thought about it, Kim Possible's screams did sound rather lackluster compared to what he'd heard girls meant to be her age belt out in ads for horror movies. They were vanilla screams, he decided. Okay, maybe vanilla _bean_, which was sweeter than most people gave it credit for being, but still nothing compared to the rich, savory chocolate he was going to feast on in a few days. She still wasn't giving him her everything.

If he hadn't been in such soaring spirits, Drakken might have yelled himself.

That, and the fact that he didn't want to see Athena crumble under the might of Dr. Drakken's gravel-spliced yell. Talk about being _thunderstruck_. . .

_Gggnnng_, though.

"I suppose this _is _getting rather old, isn't it?" Drakken said pleasantly, because he could be pleasant if he needed to be. He tapped the side of the mouse with his fingertips, and the cursor shot over to a tab he hadn't been aiming for. Drakken jerked halfway across the console and restrained the grunts of frustration firing inside him when he saw that the tab read, "Edit."

Actually, in his vision, it read "Etid," but he had it descrambled soon enough. No one else had to know.

_Holy ions - video-editing!_

"You know what would be _really _fun to do?" Drakken said. Excitement spiked his pulse, beatboxing in his cheeks. "Edit this to make her look even worse!"

Athena didn't move a synthetic muscle. An odd feeling wiggled through Drakken, the kind he used to get back in college when he pushed his glasses back onto his forehead in exhaustion and soon afterward thought he had misplaced them. Odd _and _ridiculous, given he'd dropped the specs (one of the teens' nicer names for them) around the time he earned a criminal record.

Shego rested her elbow on the console. "I'm interested."

And _that _didn't happen very often. Drakken thought he'd pop - as it was, he squeaked a little when he double-clicked and was assaulted with every option for everything ever known to humanity. He dragged the cursor across the staggering array to a paintbrush icon he understood, poked and prodded a few things, tapped and fiddled with a few more, and pretty soon Kim Possible, still shrieking in the eel tank, also sported green hair and a very convincing-looking nugget of mucus hanging from each nostril.

"Ooh, I like," Shego said. "Can you give her zits?"

That required still more poking and prodding, more tapping, fiddling, and even some following of directions. Ten sweaty minutes later, however, Drakken succeeded in sprinkling acne cysts thick and far over Kim Possible's skin, garish and unreal like blooms of spray paint but still so gratifying to see clogging every available space on her face, including the perfect little pinch of her chin.

"Those are a bit too - bright." Athena squinted at the screen. "Give me a few minutes with it, and I can get it so it looks more natural."

Drakken nodded and stepped back - one of the most difficult things in the world to do. Her hand brushed over his as she reached for the mouse. It didn't stifle his movement and throw his nerve cells into a panic the way it would have with another human being, and he smiled. She toned down the color saturation, blending in subtler hues and shading the edges until even a licensed dermatologist might have been taken by them.

"Beautiful job, Athena! Well, ugly job, but that was the point!" Drakken fingered a pore that felt a tad too ripe itself and chuckled away the nervousness. "Now - about those screams - "

"Ugh. I think I'm going to be hearing those screams in my sleep." Athena's eyes startled into an almost-too-quick roll.

"So what say we make them a little -" Drakken rubbed his hands together, stirring up both kinetic energy and glee - "funnier?"

Athena didn't exactly light up, but curiosity poured out of her, and that was good enough for Drakken.

He had to click through what must have been a thousand and three screens before he finally noticed the tiny megaphone shape that indicated audio control. From there it was easy. Relatively so. It had been quite a while since Drakken had converted a record to ridiculous heights, but surely the process couldn't have changed _drastically_. All he had to do was hunt for the squiggle of letters that ended in "PM" - for "per minute" - which was -

There! Drakken swooped down on it like a hawk upon prey - an analogy he decided to hang on to for safekeeping. His clever fingers went to work, expanding the numbers in the boxes, tightening the audio, forcing all of Kim Possible's words into one big rush.

When he was done, she sounded like one of those Christmas-caroling chipmunks. Breathing helium.

"EletriceelsohnoohnoRonwe'vegottogetout!" Drakken replayed it again and again and again until his body was in spasms, overwhelmed by laughing and milk and encroaching triumph.

Athena giggled, and it reminded him of wind chimes stirred by a subtle breeze. It hit Drakken with a start that he hadn't yet worked with her on her maniacal laugh. The sound of her giggle made him decide to put it off a little while longer. After all, there were still many, annoyingly many, things that needed to happen before The Plan came to fruition and Athena was ready for her Great Reveal.

"I bet -" Drakken gasped - "You know what? I bet she would sound even dumber if we _slowed it down_!"

Without waiting for assent, he grabbed the mouse again and inverted the process, tapping in teeny-weeny numbers, placing huge gaping spaces between syllables so that they ended up trickling like molasses.

_Molasses_. Drakken gave himself a half-hearted scolding for using such a cliche. It was just that no other comparison he could make - Silly Putty or hot saltwater taffy - could truly do justice to the dopey depths of it.

"Score for the team!" Athena spun toward Drakken and lifted her hand for a high-five, which he was glad to return. He enjoyed her company. And from the tweaks at the corners of her lips, so did Shego.

Athena gave them a smooth smile, and Drakken swiped a hand across his own sweat-glazed forehead. He had almost - _almost _\- forgotten how murderously humid this lair was. Resentment for his lot in life, for the backflipping brat who had cut him down to this, burst in him again. He punched the replay button harder than was strictly necessary.

"E. . . L. . . E. . TR. . . I. . . C EE. . .L . . .S? OH. . . N. . . OOOO. . ."

Drakken had to bury his face in the arms he'd folded on the console. The hilarity was simply too much.

When he raised his head, Athena was glancing at her wristwatch. "Yikes, it's getting late," she said. "I'd better go power down if I'm gonna catch my bus tomorrow."

The lair's atmosphere grew hotter, harder, unfriendlier.

"See ya." Shego flapped a short wave at Athena, turning so the light - such as it was - grazed her cheek. Drakken winced at the bruise, a giant grape-juice stain across a floor otherwise scrubbed spotless. She did need RICE on it, no matter what she claimed.

_STOP it, Drakken!_ he commanded himself. His fingers twiddled together. _Shego's not lying around whining about it. She's fine. And it shall all be worth it once you take down Kim Possible!_

The world fell into place again.

Athena flipped, her back to him, and headed for the laboratory wing, her feet somehow elegant even as they made contact with carpet that was surely infested with more than one fungus. Something about the independence of her walk made Drakken ache inside for the girl he'd created her to be, the girl she'd fooled Kim Possible into thinking she was - the frail, painfully shy freshman in need of a friend. She had grown older (and older-looking) and stronger, and of course that pleased Drakken; it was vital to the plan. It was just. . . it was just. . . hard somehow, even for him.

Drakken leaped from his seat, sending the chair careening into a wall. "I'll walk you back!" he cried, springing to Athena's side. He could practically feel Shego rolling her eyes, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that Athena smiled at him again and didn't appear to just be yukking it up at whatever it was he'd just done now. No, she was happy to see him beside her.

A rare occurrence. Even if he had shown up at HenchCo and started flinging twenty-dollar bills around at random, everyone would have stayed stiff in their seats, muttering about how all the _other _villains threw around fifties.

The cuts went deeper, internal wounds that Drakken couldn't fix with a Band-Aid or even a tourniquet.

Athena entered the lab and nimbly sidestepped every obstacle she confronted, obstacles that Drakken would have veered right into if she hadn't plucked him by the back of his lab coat and steered him around them. He grinned at her sheepishly - a stupid expression; since when did sheep grin? This room was cool compared to the one they had just vacated, and when Drakken breathed in, he got a mouthful of something silky, almost silvery.

When Athena reached the stasis chamber, she climbed dutifully inside, resting her head against the hole carved in its shape at the top. Her feet clicked into hollows on the bottom. The restraint didn't stamp panic all over Athena's face, but Drakken shivered anyway and took two, then three steps away. He was picturing a glass door slamming shut, never to open again until Shego drove her fist through it. Clutching the skinny mattress so that his knuckles looked even more anemic than usual. Watching as his flesh grew tighter and his uniform grew looser.

Drakken forced a scream back down his esophagus, and it was like he'd swallowed a firecracker, which didn't go so well with the milk. The room swayed around him.

Athena's eyes began to drift closed, slowly, reluctantly, as if part of her wanted to stay. Drakken couldn't blame her there. He'd lived through it himself, getting assaulted by fatigue when all that stood between you and your plan's completion was a few measly hours, or worse, lying in bed clenched up, refusing to doze, knowing that you would be awakened by something other than the dawn. Something like nightmares or blaring alarms or a guard whose best contribution to the world would have been as a polar bear's TV dinner, feeding the endangered species and all. And he wouldn't wish those on anyone -

No. No, that wasn't true. That was a Kim Possible mantra. Good-guy thinking. The list of people Drakken would wish it on without hesitation was appropriately long and villainous. But not Athena.

_Not Athena. Not ever Athena._

She had suffered - willingly - for the sake of the Plan, for _his _sake. She wasn't a Bebe who grabbed his arm and twisted him into knots he had never known even existed. And compared to Shego, she wasn't even that much of a Sassy McSmartypants.

Something soft flared in Drakken's nasal passages. He'd been fond of every machine he'd ever made, of course, and had to pretend he wasn't crying when they got destroyed. That was nothing new.

But this machine was more than the sum of its parts - _her _parts, Drakken corrected himself. None of his machines had ever worn makeup before. No, that wasn't true - the Bebes had, the lip-blush and the cheek-stick or whatever they were called. He'd just never had the urge to wipe it off before, get a glimpse of them in their rough-draft state.

Drakken eased a strand of Athena's hair from her brow, the way Mother used to do to him as he drifted off to sleep. Usually his touch shouted, he knew, but this time, by aligning his feet precisely with the earth's gravitational field and narrowing his focus on the creation in front of him and squeezing every muscle he possessed, he managed to make it whisper. It was what she deserved. "Good night, Athena," he said.

Athena's eyes were already half-shut, and the remainder of her face had also slipped away to someplace else. "Good night, Dad."

The stasis chamber wheezed shut, its light flickered red, and for a moment Drakken couldn't remember what that meant, what any of it meant, where he was even standing and why it was dark and cold.

_Dad._ The word pushed inside him, yet not in the way Kim Possible's taunts did. This typed itself into a keypad in the recesses of him, unlocking some door Drakken didn't even know was there, revealing a room filled with who-knew-what - pirate plunder? Killer bees? Overdue laundry? - and left him wondering how she had gained admittance with "Dad" when he'd been sure to set the pass-code as "Overlord Drakken."

Drakken gazed down at his hands, suddenly despising their smallness. Was this - this slackening one minute and hardening into a shield the next - was this what it was like to have a child?

He tossed the hypothesis back and forth between his hard-working little gray cells. Much as he hated to admit it, Dr. Drakken could not answer his own question. He'd never had a child. Never even had a pet, unless you counted the snapping turtle that had spent one particularly damp spring camped out in their backyard when he was in high school. Wasn't an especially demanding relationship - Drew had tossed it the vegetables he hid away in his napkins at mealtimes and dreamed about using it to exact revenge on his enemies. A snapping turtle could bite off a man's finger, he'd heard. How well would Carl Thompson have been able to hold his beloved football without fingers?

(Not very well, that was how.)

Drakken's knee bounced his entire body into one big nervous tic. He took a moment - or seven - to close his own eyes and find his current location on the line he'd drawn, perfectly graphed so that it intersected with Kim Possible's axis precisely at zero. If he didn't concentrate on that, this whole thing would go down in flames, pointless flames at that. He couldn't do that to himself.

Or Athena. Maybe not even to Shego, as vexatious as she could be.

_Focus, Drakken. Focus._

It would have been easier if he could get "Dad" out of his head, but Drakken could already tell it was going to be harder to shake than that one toothpaste-commercial jingle.

The laboratory door decompressed, and Drakken stepped through the threshold, right back into Terrarium World. Goose bumps and perspiration jumped out of his skin at the exact same time, and Drakken could feel the muggy air curling the tips of the non-ponytail that he _also _had Kim Possible to blame for. Back to reality, and it stunk. Literally. Something in the fridge.

This place was coming apart and was never going to expand beyond its shipping-crate dimensions, and Drakken still would have traded it for a good high-ceilinged lair - or better yet, a good high-ceilinged _palace _\- in a heartbeat. And whatever was growing through the cracks in the walls put a funky taste in Drakken's mouth. Anything, however, beat prison chow.

Except possibly astronaut food. Drakken had heard that was some nasty stuff. But he would still much rather be in space than in prison.

Of course, if she kept calling him "Dad" it just might launch him into orbit anyway.

Drakken padded across the floor - padded right into a wall that sprang up into his path out of nowhere, suddenly and painfully. From miles away, someone hiccuped out a little yelp that couldn't belong to Dr. Drakken, Destroyer of Lives. There was no choice but to hop from foot to foot and shake his hands until he half-expected them to flap off his wrists, distracting his body from the pain still echoing through his brow bone.

A snicker from beside him. When at last the stinging, red-tinged fog dissipated, Drakken saw Shego standing there, and she seemed to have dialed the disdain down a few notches. She didn't look _soft_, not by any means, but her eyes were pokey and not stabby. "So did you get our widdle baby Athena all tucky-tucked in?" she said.

Drakken knew his nod was absent. Not absent as in _gone_; absent as in _focused primarily on something else _\- the "something else" in this case being the trusting glow that had come over Athena's face as she'd powered down, a glow that had transformed Drakken's insides from a raging inferno to a cozy fireplace with a dog curled up on a rug in front of it. "You know, as rebellious and independent as teenagers try to act, deep down inside they secretly crave boundaries and the traditions that let them know they're still children."

"Thank you, Dr. Spock." Shego tossed the sentence to him like a tennis ball she expected Drakken to let go into the net, but he grabbed his racket and parried to stop her lob. Or whatever they said in tennis-language.

"Oh, come now, Shego. Spock wasn't the doctor - he was the _commanding officer_. Bones McCoy was the doctor."

Shego let her arms fall to her sides. "Help," she said, only she sounded far too calm, not at all the way people sounded when they were in peril, when their lairs were incinerated and their hands cuffed and their kicking, screaming selves hauled away to cubes. Cubes with doors no one ever opened and lights no one ever shut off, which was pointless because they never managed to brighten that place any. . .

Drakken wheezed. _No. _Bad memories. Rotten memories. Memories that pushed you down and leered at you when you fell.

He managed to scrape them to the back of his mind. Not that they didn't put up a fight, of course, but they were no match for Dr. Drakken's world-conqueror-worthy tenacity! The jeers from the past were sentenced to some dark corner where they would hunker down like a cowering freshman on his first day of high school.

_Blast! _Not a great analogy for someone trying to forget.

Instantly, Drakken was sorry he'd ever insulted the mugginess of the room. It nuzzled against him from all sides, close as close could be, and was the only thing that reminded him he wasn't in prison or gym class. He strutted, wide-legged, cowboy style, over to the console and propped his aching back against his swivel chair. His fingers calmed as soon as they felt buttons and knobs beneath them, and the rest of him soon followed when he unpaused the footage and heard Kim Possible screaming the spark right out of herself.

Drakken chortled evilly until the milk bounced. Even as glorious as the sound of her coming unglued was, she wasn't giving her top performance here. She would scream better than that, louder and higher and more terrified, when she realized she had been ensnared in Drakken's evil web from day one.

Shego straddled her own chair, hooking her jaw over the back. "We got a good take tonight, huh, Dr. D?"

"Did we ever!" There was no need for a question mark. It wasn't a question. Drakken rerouted his attention to the screen - gazing upon Shego's bruise fired up the internal equivocal of a chemical rash in his chest. "And it's all right here, all ours for the world to see! She may be Kim Possible, but she isn't Kim-vincible!" Drakken went ahead and let himself beam. He could all but hear the fanfare ringing in the background.

Shego swatted at the air in front of her as if it had invaded her personal space. "Ugh. This place smells bad enough without your puns."

That situation called for a glower, so Drakken glowered at her while his brain buffeted. "Gmnnh. . .ughhhn. . . yes, well, the air might not be fresh, but your attitude sure is!" he finally zinged back at her. "Take that!"

To Drakken's surprise, Shego actually laughed - a laugh that didn't slash out and leave claw marks on him.

It invigorated him. He rocked forward, nearly toppling the chair sideways, and drummed his fingers on the console. "Yes, Kim Possible's first failure shall be revealed to the world of -" Big dramatic breath, another chortle just because - "social media, and she shall then be ripped apart."

"You know, you probably shouldn't say 'shall' more than once per sentence," Shego said. "Or, like, at all."

Drakken re-donned the glower. "It, 'like,' sounds impressive," he said in a nasally imitation of the immaturity he'd just heard.

"Maybe to King Arthur." Drakken watched, his eyes still averted from Shego's discolored cheek, as she shook back her black flowing hair and mercifully dropped the subject. "Man, she's going to get roasted, though, isn't she?"

"Yes!" Drakken picked up the Biometric Power Converter, their other haul for the night, and fitted its lovely hexagonal edges between his knuckles. "Just imagine the cruel memes!"

Shego blinked. "Memes?"

"Memes, Shego! They're small pictures - usually still photos, but often .gifs - that become very pop -"

"Okay. Doc. I know what a meme is. I'm just surprised _you _know what a meme is." Shego recrossed her arms at the top of the chair's headrest, but she didn't sink her face into them and settle down. Never one to miss an opportunity to mouth off.

Still, she had just admitted that he knew something she hadn't thought he'd known, and that was a score for the blue team, not the green team!

Drakken stroked an imaginary beard with wisdom. "You might be surprised at the things I know."

"I just bet I would." Shego stood up and glanced at the clock sluggishly ticking above the refrigerator. "Okay, you know what? I'm headed to bed. And since implications are lost on you, I'll just say it outright: that means headphones are your new best friends."

That was fine with Drakken. Headphones only asked for outlets, not pounds of flesh or dates to the big dance.

He yanked open the top drawer and disentangled the cheap pair Shego had stolen from he-didn't-remember-where. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Shego as she stalked up to a ragged, mint-green curtain on the other side of the bathroom and yanked it back. Drakken had never gone poking around in Shego's personal quarters before, of course, but now he could see a mattress that looked as tough and wiry as Shego herself, a splintered foggy mirror balanced on a crack in the wall, and a hairbrush that rested on the crack beneath it. He felt like someone had stolen up behind him when he was off his guard and pinched his elbow _hard_.

_She deserves so much better than this. _Drakken propped his cheek on his clenched fist. _Of course, so do I, but that goes without saying!_

A moment later, Shego had ducked back through the curtain, carrying a grayish vial of something that called itself Makeup Remover. He'd always just thought women washed it off with water.

But that was not important now. Drakken situated the headphones to cup his ears and plugged them into the desktop, locking himself in a world that consisted solely of him and the screams of his enemy. It wasn't a bad world, he decided, though it could use a little popcorn to accompany the show.

The milk stuffing his belly rumbled, and Drakken winced. All right. Maybe a rain check on the popcorn.

His hands flew across the console, and the Web browser winked obediently on. He and Shego had set up an anonymous channel the day before in preparation for what was to come tonight. Drakken chased the "Upload" button with his mouse and caught it with a mighty click. After six pop-up ads, each more tooth-gnashing to sit through than the one before it, three file conversions, and a trip to find Tums, the screen finally cleared of everything that stood in the way of his stunning success. Kim Possible stood at the doorway - nay, the _gateway_! - of her own personal Humiliation Nation. (Gateways were much more dramatic.)

And Drakken twisted the key in the lock.

Now to sit back and watch the firestorm.

The site began pressuring Drakken to watch cat videos, as if there were any chance that a supervillain would be interested in those after accomplishing what he just had! Although the kitten popping bubble wrap looked kind of cute. If you were into that sort of thing. Drakken opened it in a separate tab - another thing Shego probably didn't know he knew how to do - and creaked back in the chair as the fuzzy shape frolicked across his screen. A passable passage of time until the firestorm began.

He knew he could count on Generation X to stab one of their own in the back. Or was it Gen Y? Gen Z, even? And, sheesh, what were they going to do when they ran out of letters? Would it be Generation double-A next? The future's cultural anthropologists would probably think that meant the first generation after batteries were invented. . .

Why was Drakken the only one to see these things?

Generation Whatever-Letter turned out to be even more puzzling than Drakken had anticipated. He reloaded the video's page throughout the night, sometimes waiting as long as _ten minutes _between refreshes, and still nothing seemed to be happening. The number of views inched upward like blades of grass growing, but there were no comments, much less reaction videos and mocking reblogs. Were the teens too busy splicing unicorn heads onto Pop-Tarts to care that their idol had been pushed from her pedestal?

Drakken saw his reflection, distant and dreamlike in the blank spaces of the monitor, frown, its lips dragged down into two pendulums. This wouldn't do. This wouldn't do at _all_. They ought to be swarming Kim Possible by now and slapping her with pool noodles, and instead – nothing.

Nothing except "Dad" echoing through him, just a step off with his heartbeat, never meshing, setting him even farther on edge.

Looked like he was going to have to take matters into his own hands, scrawny though they may have been. The hands of someone who was constantly underestimated and yet never grew used to it.

Drakken quivered with the quietest wicked cackle he could sneak out as he reached for the mouse once more.

* * *

"Drakken."

Drakken awoke the next morning to a puddle of drool calling his name.

No, that didn't make any sense. There _was _a large pool on the console next to him, perfectly aligned with his oral cavity, but saliva didn't talk. At least not when a person was awake, which Drakken most assuredly was, his eyelashes encrusted with the remnants of sleep. The eyes themselves were burning as if someone had siphoned every last drop of moisture from them. They came into focus and Drakken almost wished they hadn't, because it was on the moss drizzling down the far wall, and he instantly knew what lair he was in.

"Yoo-hoo. Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey."

Drakken finally worked up to a blink. Shego crouched in front of him, her fingers poised to snap in his face. Well, that made _much _more sense than the talking-drool theory. As for the rest of it, he didn't want to see. He hated this lair.

Every supervillain's secret lair _had _to be dark and sinister, of course. But the villain who occupied it needed to stand unrivaled at the top, the _most _dark, the _most _sinister thing within. And Drakken wouldn't have been in for a landslide victory with this lair. Especially since a landslide would have no trouble crumbling this lair's walls and burying him in the dirt beneath the carpet.

In spite of the sticky heat, Drakken briefly shivered, then busied himself with prying the crusties out of his eyelashes before the fear could work its way through him. "Shego?" he said - and winced in a way that he hoped wasn't visible. Even to himself, he sounded like a chainsaw that hadn't been powered up for decades.

"Yay. He lives." If Shego were as thrilled with that information as she should have been, she wasn't showing it. She leaned one hip against the console and leveled a laser gaze at him. "Man, you were _out_. Guess who had to send Darling Daughter off to catch her bus?"

_Is that a trick question?_

Drakken glanced around the wretched little excuse for a lair to rule out any other option before he answered. "You?"

Shego nodded. Even that small, concise movement managed to drip with disdain, which stung Drakken almost as badly as the realization that Athena had gone off to school without a wave from him for the first time.

_Except she's not really a vulnerable teenage girl, and you're not really her doting father_, the hardest part of Drakken's villain-armor reminded him. There would be plenty of time for bonding once they ruled the world as a triumverate.

The thought massaged the knots from Drakken's spinal column, lifted him out of the chair and let him ascend to his full height. "It matters not, Shego! This is all according to plan!" Nasty, wicked energy jolted through his veins, and it was better than any five-hour energy drink he'd ever downed.

"Oversleeping is part of the plan?" Shego said.

"Yes! I mean, no! I mean - _gggnnn_!" How did she do this to him? She was the pin sailing through the air, looking to land in his balloon and burst it, but, oh-ho-ho, was she in for a surprise. He was steel-belted today.

Drakken rocked up on the tips of his toes to get a clear glimpse of the top of her head. It didn't surprise him that it too almost appeared to come to a point under all that smooth hair. That view was all the empowerment he needed to continue. "I fell asleep because I was up all night working on The Plan."

Shego's eyebrows popped up. "This oughta be good," she said - the light sarcasm obviously a cover for her excitement.

"Remember the cruel memes I mentioned?" Drakken felt the expanse of his grin double. "I made some of my own!"

Shego turned toward the screen with what looked to be more than a hint of actual interest. Cold, ruthless interest. They shared a hatred for Kim Possible, too, which was much easier than sharing a bathroom.

"Behooooold! Come see what I have created!" Drakken bellowed - and _oooh_, how impressive was _that_? The chainsaw was gone, and he could have readily been mistaken for a stage actor playing Zeus, if Drakken had to say so himself (and he usually did have to).

He reawakened the screen with a wild jiggle of the mouse. The room flooded with a rainbow glow and the projection of Kim Possible's familiar, meddlesome form - no longer meddlesome now, but bending backward to escape from her nightmares. Drakken grimaced in satisfaction and hit the "play" button maybe a little harder than he had to. Every one of Kim Possible's frightened contortions flashed in short, punchy, bam-bam-bam style, each accompanied by a violent riff of Cousin-Eddy-approved rock music.

Shego leaned forward and read aloud the puffy pink letters that spilled across the screen - "Uh-oh. Looks like Kim Possible just got -"

She stopped, and Drakken tingled inside as he watched her lips jerk, waiting for them to surge upward.

They didn't. They turned down. "Dr. D! Nobody says 'Rickrolled' anymore!" she cried, Rick-rolling her eyes.

Drakken slammed a fist down on the console. Didn't realize he'd clenched it. Didn't realize he'd let go of the mouse. "Oh, really? Are you one-hundred-percent sure of that?"

"I'm as sure as I need to be. Today's kids are _so _not gonna know what you're talking about."

Shego spoke in that _tone _again, that I-define-reality tone that Drakken hadn't yet discovered how to overpower. He clenched the mouse so tight he inadvertently commanded it to roll over to the next meme, a picture of Kim Possible - round-eyed and stupefied, legs caught in mid-churn, trying to scrabble their way up the side of the glass.

"'I can has electric eel protection?'" Shego said. Flatly. It wasn't meant to be read flatly.

She must not have understood, then. "Don't you _get _it, Shego?" Drakken said. "Like the meme about the cat and - and -"

"The cheeseburger. I know. That was pretty popular back when I was _her _age." Shego pointed her chin toward the almost-life-sized rendition of Kim Possible.

For once in his life, Dr. Drakken despised advances in technology. He wanted the meme to be on a piece of paper he could wad up and hurl at her. "I have more! I have better!"

"Impress me, then." Shego surveyed him through slouched-down eyelids.

Drakken lunged for the mouse again and almost crushed the button on his way to the next screen. Why not? He was fierce and menacing and reckless - and his hands were starting to shake like a pair of tambourines.

"Haters gonna hate. Eels gonna eel. Screamers gonna scream," came up next and received a ferocious head-shake from Shego. Its counterpart, "They see me panickin'. They hatin'," didn't fare much better - Shego actually felt the need to jab her thumb toward the floor just in case the disgusted curl of her mouth didn't already tell him everything he needed to know. When the footage of Kim Possible leaping straight out of the water segued into a celebrity whose name Drakken had forgotten flipping her palm toward the screen, imprinted with the words, "Your beloved Kim Possible is actually a fraidy-cat, KTHNXBYE," Shego put her own palm over her eyes as if he were subjecting her to ultraviolet light.

Drakken felt his shoulders shrivel inside their pads with each click of the mouse. So much for steel-belted. Right now, he was much closer to limp linguini.

Still, there was one more. One last shot. And when he loaded it, the split-screen effect remained every bit as dazzling as it had been last night - six tiny videos that might as well have been stills, each capturing Kim Possible in various stages of frozen horror, each one a different color, the glass on either side of her striped and spotted, her scream a ricochet.

Shego flicked a glance at the screen. "Now, this one, maybe - "

Kim Possible's head changed to a goat's, and rainbows spurted out its mouth when it screamed.

"No. Nope. I'm sorry, no." Shego turned away. "Dr. D, you can't expect kids to get all into memes that are almost older than _they _are."

Drakken stood, returned to his tiptoes, and tried to find the top of her head again. It wasn't working. "I was in prison for _a long time_, okay?" His voice caught in his throat on its way out and twisted back around, and it _hurt_ \- a lot more than it should have.

"Twelve years?" Shego said. She laughed at a high pitch that Drakken would never have attributed to her, and yet it still sounded juicy. If he'd ever tried laughing like that, he would have sprayed the screen with spittle, and the contempt would have set in thicker on Shego's face, and. . .

The whole thing was practically a written prescription for another glower. And what a glower it was, too! Drakken could see that his reflection wore the expression drawn on every thundercloud in every cartoon show he'd ever watched. To the scientific community, they were "cirrostratus" clouds, and he rolled around in the comfort of that knowledge.

And then he sighed.

It was meant to be a quiet sigh, but it insisted on whistling as if to draw attention to itself. Pain roared through his eye sockets now, his contacts plaster-of-Paris lumps that had long since solidified. Lubrication would be mistaken for tears at this point, so Drakken worked his darndest to hold it back.

There were words for people like Shego, many nasty words that surely would've cut her down to size. But the words weren't spoken - they were _spokes_, tiny little broken-down wheel-bits that trundled as hard as they could and got absolutely nowhere for their efforts. Drakken couldn't even whip up an analogy for how he wanted to strike back at the ridicule crowding him from every side. Two years ago, he would have said he wanted to dump kerosene on the whole thing and watch it ignite, but that was before his beloved lair went down in flames. The memory of smoke overwhelming the air seized Drakken with fingernails longer than Shego's. More frightening still was the memory of Kim Possible's face, how she'd laughed at him, as if his entire existence was on par with _orange you glad I didn't say banana?_

Drakken jammed his arms together on the console and dropped his chin, that rounded detriment to his image, on top of them. Tried to squeeze his eyes into resentful slits, too, as he rolled them up at Shego, but he felt them drifting off to some sulky place and couldn't stop them from going. "I was ready for _her _to be the punch line for once!" He bit out the words, and they tasted like lemon and ash.

Whatever he had tried to eye-message Shego had apparently gotten through. Her own eyes veered from disgust to amusement to something else, something almost softer. . . empathy was the closest thing Drakken could think of. But it had been years, it had been _decades _since Dr. Drakken had seen a living specimen of empathy, and he was hesitant to tag this one and be wrong.

Eventually the amusement prevailed. Shego jerked her head toward the screen. "But you still got the video online, right? The footage from the security cam?"

"Of course I did!" Drakken responded in the haughtiest supervillain-accent he could find inside himself. Probably haughtier than it needed to be, but then, he didn't appreciate Shego talking to him as though he might not have known which video she was referring to.

"Then that's all the ammo we need," Shego said, her voice filled with confidence. This was one of those glorious times when that confidence was contagious. He followed Shego's sneer to the Internet tab, past the six-digit viewing figures, scrolled all the way down to the comments.

And Drakken found himself in a realm that accepted his rule.

Thousands of laughing, disembodied heads - _emoji_, Drakken was hip enough to know they were called - guffawed their support from the colorless screen they popped against. Drakken _felt _their power, every single one of them a microscopic thermonuclear warhead alive in his body. Interpersed among them were roughly a bushel and a peck of "LOL"s and "OMG"s and "ROFL"s, along with a few other acronyms Drakken asked Shego to interpret and received in reply a dried-out, "You're too young to know what that stands for."

_Which I take to mean they are something phenominally, horrifically_ \- he tingled inside the clothes he'd slept in - _icky._

The Internet had their knives out. And their maces and their axes and every other weapon that would set a metal detector beeping.

Drakken grinned until he could hardly see over his own pumped-up cheeks. How could he _not _when he pictured Kim Possible withering under the taunts she had never been exposed to, the laughter which she'd passed up the vaccine for, thinking it could never get to her? Oh, but it could. It _so _could, as the girl herself would say.

Her immune system was going to self-destruct, and he couldn't wait to watch every minute of it.

"We've done it, Shego!" Drakken bounded from his seat, clapped his palm against Shego's before she could pull hers away and she even gave him a small, twitchy smile that he devoured and wanted more of.

"That'll be one quick cargo drop to Humilation Nation," Shego said. She swiveled a mere forty degrees away from him, and Drakken's eyes fell on her cheek again. It may have been his imagination, but the bruise looked harder to see already, as if said cargo drop had healed it to a yellow-green tint that better matched her skin.

Drakken fingered the scar on his own cheek, its texture muffled through his glove. He appreciated it. It made him look tough, boasted that he had been in a blood-drawing fight and _won_. All of which was true, only in his case the fight had been against the pair of scrapbook scissors he'd forgotten he was holding when he reached up to scratch an itch. In return for the six stitches, those scissors had died, screaming - at least Drakken liked to imagine they were screaming - in a blast from Drakken's Molten Metal Maker.

By the time he had mangled her life beyond recognition, Kim Possible was going to envy those scissors.

Ah, what a lovely, villainous sentiment! Drakken rubbed his hands together in pride and returned his attention to the Athena-Cam. It puttered along nicely and rewarded them another victory in last period when the Marine-lookalike teacher rested his huge mitts on the edge of the desk and shouted, "Listen up, people!" and brought every spine in that classroom up to a stiffer attention than if he had blown an air-raid siren.

"Who _is _this guy, anyway?" Shego asked from her perch on her folding chair, her nail file poised above the blades.

"No idea," Drakken replied. "I just call him Private Tutor."

Actually, he never had before, but, oh goodness, it was too good a name to pass up! He slanted only a half grin over at Shego - more sophisticated that way. "Get it? 'Tutor' because it's basically the same thing as 'teacher' and 'private' as in the army? Like Private Gomer Pyle?"

"Private who?" Shego said and then dashed the question away with a flap of her hand. "Never mind. I get the joke."

Drakken scowled. Getting it and expressing the proper appreciation for it were two _vastly _different things.

Private Tutor - ooh, he really did like that name! - growled his way through a long speech about the first month of school drawing to a close and the students having gotten to show their stuff and the award ceremony that was to be given next week, commemorating those who had excelled. A few kids, a _select _few, pulled themselves up in their desks smugly, and anger popped hot and massive inside Drakken like a handful of corn kernals. Those were the children who knew they were guaranteed a spot on the coveted Honor Roll, a roll that Drew Lipsky had always been one English class away from. Those were the children who had no idea what it was like to have letters leap up from the page and change places in between peeks, to wonder why the letters on report cards couldn't just as easily transmute themselves into something more favorable.

The things Drakken didn't want to recall and the hopes for what was to come clashed until his brain had deteroirated into a war zone and a headache was in the works. It backed off only when Private Tutor said, with a gear-grinding sigh, "The superintendant instructed me to inform you that this year we will be handing out 'Freshman of the Month' awards to the student who has worked the hardest and shown the most improvement."

He snapped his mouth shut - before he could add "and sentimental hogwash like that," Drakken was sure - and surveyed the classroom, which quickly became a wasp nest of whispers. Some other, non-Honor-Roll-bound students had perked up and curled their hands around their pencils in cautious hope. Drakken expected the buffoon to be among them, but he was whispering frantically to the mole rat in his pocket. He'd _actually _brought the little vermin with him to school and not even as a delivery for the science lab.

Although Drakken's mind was kind of stuck on how impossible it was for Private Tutor to answer to anyone.

_Speaking of "impossible. . ." How's my favorite little nemesis?_

As if she'd heard him, Athena rotated her head until Kim Possible came into view. Her nose was buried in a book as the class hummed around her. She wasn't sulking, not exactly - a cool girl like Kim Possible would never stoop to something like _sulking_ \- but her face _was _as dark and sour as an overripe avacado.

It would have to be enough for now. Or so Drakken thought.

When the final bell rang, the students ran for the door with the typical amount of jockeying and shoving. _That _hadn't changed any since Drakken's own high school days. He could smell the stale sweat and feel the heat in virtual reality so close to reality-reality that it nearly gagged him, and he was about to turn away - not being cowardly, just until he remembered how to _breathe _\- when he saw Kim Possible slip between two rows of rowdy boys and come out on the other side with her neck bent.

Actually bent. Drakken's palette, so nauseated a second ago, began to water.

It only got better from there. The tall girl who managed to get away with wearing her skimpy cheerleading top to every class broke loose from a knot of chattering sophomores and curled her fingers around Kim Possible's wrist. "Kim! I've been looking for you all day. Are you doing all right?" she said in a voice that made Drakken think of fermented fruit. "After that _traumatic _experience you had last night?"

Her eyes were turned down at the corners, saddened by design, and yet Drakken knew he heard evil in there somewhere. He rocked his seat forward until he almost fell across the console. Kim Possible shot backward like a car that had been gunned in reverse and lashed her arms across her chest.

"We fought a villain and she got away, if that's what you mean," Athena piped up, smooth as cream - cream that was infinitely more convincing than Cheer Girl's fruit, Drakken noted, glowing inside. She wrapped an arm around Kim's waist. "It could have happened to anyone."

"Actually, that's _not _what I mean." Cheer Girl ran the backs of her fingers along her hair, bouncing its ends in that fashion peculiar to self-righteous teenage females. "I'd never have guessed you still had your little thing about eels, K. I thought you got over that in, like, elementary, right?"

Kim Possible withdrew further. "How did you know about that?"

"It's all _over _the Internet," Cheer Girl said. "Haven't you seen?"

Drakken doubled over in his seat, stamping his feet on the floor. A stitch formed in his side that could reach hazardous conditions if this got any better.

It did. Because right there, right before everyone's eyes, Kim Possible shuddered.

Just a little, brief thing, immeasurable really. Nevertheless, drool ran down Drakken's chops at the sight of it. He darted a glance at Shego to make sure she had seen, and she nodded and tapped one slender finger to her lips. It occured to him in that blink of a moment that they were getting better at talking without talking.

Even as Drakken watched, Kim Possible cleaned the hurt he'd seen right off her face and recovered a sparkly smile. "No, I haven't, Bonnie. I'm not chained to my phone like _some _people I know."

With that, she pivoted and stalked off down the hall. Cheer Girl's next remark to Athena, whatever it was, got lost as Drakken's ears brimmed with the sound of his own delight. His chuckle rippled his chest on its way out, making it wider, stronger, Drakken was convinced. And he was just about as convinced that there would never again be a reason to frown in his life.

And there wasn't.

Until Athena got home.

It was a thoughtful frown, Drakken knew as soon as it took up residence on his forehead, but it was a frown all the same. His marvelous, gifted creation picked her way down the concrete stairs like she _didn't _have them memorized, her knuckles white on either side of her backpack straps. She stared out at the lair from behind a sheer curtain of shyness that should have deleted itself by now. Shyness he only programmed into her for show.

Athena brightened when she saw him, though - of course - and came over and treated him to a hug that, thanks to his ingenious engineering, didn't feel the slightest bit stiff. It _did _chase away Drakken's frown and guide his arms to wrap around her and hold her a little closer to make up for what she'd had to go without this morning.

"Heya, kid." Shego clapped a hand to Athena's shoulder. "Or should I say 'Freshman of the Month'?"

Athena studied the designer high-tops that looked like they belonged atop far finer things than this carpet that was mossy in more ways than one. "We don't know for _sure _that it'll be me."

_Did those words just come out of _my _Athena's mouth?_

All Drakken could do was gape, until his lower mandible almost dragged that revolting carpet. If there had been the merest suggestion of sarcasm in her statement, he wouldn't feel as if he'd been teleported to another planet. But Athena gazed back at him with modesty, timidity that didn't come from him _or _Shego, and, yes, he had definitely been teleported to another planet. One outside the asteroid belt. Maybe Pluto. If it even counted as a planet anymore.

The list of things he didn't understand was getting longer, and it made Drakken wish a henchman were around to berate.

"_Technically_, yes," he said instead, and the fingernails around his heart dug in a little deeper. "But, come on, Athena! It's so _obvious _that it's going to be you! Kim Possible is the only one who ever had a chance of measuring up to you, and after _that _video went virulent - "

"Viral," Shego and Athena corrected him in unison.

" - exactly, that - she'll go down in history as the Screaming Eel Girl." Drakken nodded the truth into place and gave it a menacing look to ensure it stayed there.

Athena glanced upward. "Yeah. I guess." Her eyes returned to her shoes.

Okay, this was getting bizarre. "Something troubling you, Athena?" Drakken asked in his best paternal voice.

"Yeah." Athena let her backpack thump to the floor and unzipped it, all without looking at Drakken. "I guess - I've been meaning to ask you - what was prison like?"

Drakken's soul collapsed.

He felt it, something buckling, giving way - except it was a piece deep, deep within, nothing so easy to repair as a knee. An oceanic roar filled his ears, throbbed in his wrists, leeched the color from around his scar. It was all coming back to him, less like motivation and more like a scab ripped away. The poisonous dark. The sharp scent of the guard's aftershave mocking Drakken's own wobbly electric razor, the one that only needed to be used every four or five days.

Drakken locked himself down at the waist, which occupied operating systems he would have needed to start shaking in leaflike fashion, but also left his middle concave and made him have to death-grip the console to keep from pitching forward. The mossy nubs of carpet seemed to be puncturing the soles of his boots and digging into his feet, which wasn't a thing that could even happen. It _wasn't_, Drakken reminded himself as he waged war with the rapid gasps trying to establish dominion in his chest.

The ugly little lair blurred, which was a mercy as far as Drakken was concerned. But it didn't take the edge off the steak-knife look Shego threw his way. Her eyes read, as clearly as the print in any operator's manual, _Grow up, Drakken._

And he ached to. At this point, it had even superseded world domination as his greatest desire in life. But it was like telling a cut not to bleed. . . and. . . and. . .

. . .and blood was the last thing he should have been thinking about. The inside of Drakken's head fuzzed like a walkie-talkie too cheap to transmit underground.

Athena took a step backward. "I'm sorry," she said. "Is it too hard for you to talk about?"

There was something lurking in the curve of every syllable, something cushiony and soft. Something like pity.

It was a different sort of hurt, this one, closer to a splinter embedded in his finger, the pain dramatically out of proportion with what such a tiny wood shaving should cause. _Hmmm. Do I want pity?_

Well, it was better than a kick in the face - but only just. Certainly Drakken wanted people to understand why he did what he did and to have compassion on him because of what he had been through, but _pity _him, as if he had some type of _defect _that prevented him from experiencing life the way others did? As if he were a Labrador retriever afraid of the water?

No, Dr. Drakken did not want pity. Least of all from his own creation.

Drakken pitched and shifted, his lab coat too big for him.

_Or maybe you're just too small for it._

It hissed at the back of his mind, its presence surprising Drakken. Under normal circumstances his ego was his bouncer, chucking out any trouble-making thought before it could manifest itself. How this one had managed to sneak by, Drakken wasn't sure. Unless thinking of prison automatically took his firewall down, left him open to such attacks.

"No," Drakken said to it and to Athena and to the rest of the dad-blasted world. "No, I shall tell you!"

The words stumbled out drunkenly, but at least he'd worked in a "shall." Which was good because he had no earthly idea where to go from there.

Athena saved him with a question. "So, is it like what they show in the movies?"

"No. Nothing like in the movies," Drakken said, as quickly as he could. "Movies led me to believe prison would be more crowded and more. . ." He flashed back to the prison duds hanging farther away from his torso with each passing day and grabbed on to the least injurious part of the memory. ". . . more orangery."

"'Orangery'?" Shego brought herself up like a lightning rod in her chair. "That's not a word!"

"GGGGK!"

For a moment, all Drakken could do was stutter. He was preparing to pour out his soul here, risk infecting the splinters under his skin, and she was running a _red pen _across it?

It was Athena who spoke up first. "Actually, it _is _a word, but it means a greenhouse used for growing oranges."

Bless that girl and her search-engine brain. "There, you see?" Drakken shot a smug grin at Shego. "I win!"

"No, you do not 'win.' It's a _noun_." Shego shook back her hair with what looked far too much like disgust for Drakken's peace of mind. Not that he had much left, which made him even more determined to cling to every scrap he could.

Drakken glared at her for the longest, coldest time he could without blinking before returning his attention to Athena, refocusing his brain - which was maybe _somewhat _messier than hers. "I was expecting them to give me an orange jumpsuit like in the movies, see? But they didn't. It was a highly unflattering shirt and shorts. Blue. I don't know whether that was the standard color, or if they just thought they were being clever." Drakken could just imagine the prison officials now, gathered into a tittering knot as Drakken was yanked from his beloved lab coat and tossed a uniform and told his choice was to either don it or walk around in his boxers. "And short-sleeved, too. Both of them."

"In the Arctic?" Outrage sparked in Athena's voice.

Drakken nodded. "I think they _did _have central heating, but that can only do so much!" To his relief, his own booming voice swelled to rule over the room, louder than the drip of water above him and stronger than the reek of mold around him. A storm of wrath began brewing inside him, and he welcomed the clouds that propped him up, the flashes that organized his various aches and pangs, and the steady wind that took control of his thundering pulse. Most important of all, it grabbed whatever fear was there and distorted it beyond recognition. Sent it into the Witness Protection Program where no would-be crime-fighters barely out of braces would be able to track it down.

"Did they feed you?" Athena scanned Drakken's (admittedly diminished) frame up and down, as if counting the number of bones she could see.

Drakken pulled his spine straight and almost clunked his skull against the ceiling. Nothing fit where it was supposed to fit anymore, it seemed, and it made him mourn all the more for his island lair with the dimensions he had memorized. "They did. Technically. But it could have been dog food." Drakken shuddered as he remembered the lukewarm slop, sometimes ladled onto a plate, sometimes plopped into a bowl, and always delivered into his cell through the slit in the doorway - a slit just big enough to trap his hands, as Drakken had learned during a radical escape attempt. "Actually, I think there are people who feed their dogs better! Dementor's mutant wiener dogs probably get filet mignon every -"

"Off topic," Shego coughed into her fist.

"So, yes, the food was not exactly gourmet." Drakken tried to twist the sarcasm tighter until nothing else could get through - Shego made it seem so easy. "And that one hour of sunlight a day I thought prisoners were constitutionally required to get?"

Athena nodded.

"Never happened! Granted, there's not much sunlight in the Arctic to go around, but I never got outside my cell." His tongue was warming up, which made it move faster, which warmed it up still more. Ahh, good old kinetic energy!

"Not at all?" Athena whispered. Under the makeup her face looked young, not quite as pale as Shego's but clammier.

Drakken shook his head and was hit by another stab of homesickness for his ponytail. His neck felt naked and raw. Definitely a firewall-down situation. "Not ever, _ever_. Not since I had 'everything I needed' in my cell. You know how they say 'those four walls are closing in on me'? Well, they were. Even though there were actually six walls!"

Speaking of walls. . . the ones in the lair had to be creeping closer together, _had _to be. Drakken leaped from his seat and zipped to the center of the room before his common sense could activate and drone at him that it had to be a panic-illusion. So what, though? This gave him much more room to pace a path and flail his arms. If anyone asked, that would have been why he relocated in the first place.

_Good thinking, Drakken, _he congratulated himself.

"Six walls?" Athena said, eyebrows up.

"The room was a hexagonal. . . diamond. . . thingy." Drakken's hands did their wobbly best to outline the room's unusual shape. He could still recall when he'd spent most of an afternoon calculating its surface area and the subsequent afternoon comparing it to its volume for utter lack of anything else to do. "Very small. Glass on all the sides."

His breath got hung up on something in his throat. Drakken massaged the area above his larynx with a thumb.

Athena grabbed the back of his newly-vacated chair and squeezed as if she was trying to choke the life out of it. "And they thought that was big enough for you and a cellmate?"

Drakken never would have imagined he could catch a chill in this lair, yet seconds later the humidity that he had perhaps been too hard on was spiraling out of reach and being replaced by a frigid Arctic breeze. The present slid into the past. The lights dimmed, room spun, the whole twelve yards.

_Can't go back, can't go back. Stop! Stop! In the name of the planet's soon-to-be ruler, I order you!_

Something gnawed and growled frantically inside Drakken, something that needed to be rocked free. He tangled his arms around himself and fought for air, fingers twisting in his lab coat.

_Wait a minute - lab coat. _He was wearing a lab coat. With adequate sleeves. Not hospital-gown-thin.

The wild terror in Drakken's head throbbed to a halt at his temples. Breathless and shaken, he stumbled back on his heels and watched the prison's interior recede, wanting to kiss the stupid moldy walls for not being see-through.

"Drakken?" Athena said, braid swinging as she tilted her head.

Drakken let his eyes sink shut. "No. There was no cellmate. There was no - anyone! Just a guard, and he was a disgrace to his profession, if you ask me!"

"Did he beat you up or something?" Athena asked. All traces of pity were gone. She appeared ready to maim the next person who gave Drakken grief for looking like a walking blueberry scone with a blueberry-muffin-round face.

"No!" The word burst from Drakken like it had been Heimleched out of him. "But I almost wished he would. Then at least someone would have been paying _attention _to me!"

Shego lowered her nail file, and Drakken wished he could interpret the blankness that looked back at him. Whatever it was, it had to be better than the taunts of, "How would we even know if you had hypothermia, pal?" and "I guess they just don't make supervillains like they used to" he had endured for over a year.

"He only spent about half the day in there. His favorite pastime was mocking me, and he wasn't even any good at it!" Drakken grunted at his sidekick. "You could have easily given him lessons, Shego."

Shego's lips twisted, as if they wanted to smile, but somehow just. . . couldn't.

"The whole thing was very shoddily run." Drakken wrung the perspiration from one glove and steadied himself against the refrigerator, whose proximity to him he only misjudged by an inch or two, minimizing the resulting topple-over. "What if I had fallen or died or fallen _and _died? Somebody should have been there. Why. . why wasn't anybody there?"

Drakken could _hear _the broken bits of himself rattling and ringing. It was a sound he had always despised.

Shego's expression suggested she had taken a swig of long-expired milk.

Athena's was murky, clouded over. She came up to Drakken and put her arms around him. "I'm sorry. I'm so, _so _sorry that happened to you."

If Drakken had felt even a trace of softness in her touch, he would have dropped like a rope bridge that was _also _well past its expiration date. But vengeful ferocity hummed beneath her synthetic skin. Good thing, too. Because that bridge was over a bottomless pit, and to start falling was to never stop.

Shego made a hoarse, faint sound in the back of her throat. Perhaps it was distantly related to sympathy, composed of the same elements in different ratios. Perhaps they shared some DNA.

The cold steel of the refrigerator door began to feel unfriendly under Drakken's elbow, and he backed away from it. Right now he was really, really wishing he had something to stick under a microscope or set to gurgling in a Bunsen burner. There was too much space in his mind right now - space and a little tickle of a thought that he tried to capture and discard, only it was better at resisting arrest than Drakken had been.

A thought that said, _Not safe yet. Not safe yet. I have to be safe - and the world will never be safe for me until I control it._

And as much as Drakken willed its appraisal of him to be a lie, he suspected it was anything but.

"I'm sorry," Athena's voice repeated from across a vast ocean. "I just wanted to know."

It took Drakken a few seconds, a few gasps to reconcile with his surroundings, to know that he was no longer crammed behind glass like a museum exhibit, with seventeen doors standing between him and a panoramic white as empty as the warden's laugh. His current living conditions weren't the kind you would write home about - even if you _were _comfortable discussing supervillainy and evil lairs with your mother - but they weren't a tiny, invisible noose around his neck, either. The sinkhole in his stomach did yawn deeper, though, as he imagined Kim Possible safe and sound, snuggled down into a life that would never need supplementing while Drakken's was dying of iron deficiency on the floor in front of her.

_Just for a few more days, Drakken. Just for a few - more - days! _The words winged inside Drakken's head, so fast and elusive he couldn't get a mental grip on them.

Shego interrupted his attempts. "So, what's this little doohickey again?" She reached for the Biometric Power Converter, and Drakken yanked it away from the curl of her fingertips. Her touch would have been irreverent, Drakken could tell, and that was something that no invention should have had to suffer.

"This 'little doohickey,'" Drakken said, and he didn't bother to hide his contempt, "is a Biometric Power Converter. Capable of transferring one organism's powers to another. Given that it came from an animal research lab, they were probably looking to harness the natural abilities of the electric eels and the naked mole rats and. . . such."

Shego scoffed, a subtle sound that still knifed at Drakken, even though he figured it wasn't directed at him. "'Cause THAT's ethical. But - seriously - what's a naked mole rat got that anyone would want?"

"Actually, naked mole rats don't get cancer, are immune to acid, and can live up to ten times longer than their nearest rodent relatives," Athena recited.

Her voice was alight with knowledge once more, and it relieved Drakken to hear. She'd been entirely too somber ever since their sweeping electric-eel victory. Had Shego played the part too well? Scared her? _What_?

"Nice." Shego's eyes didn't widen, not exactly, but they budged from their tight little slivers. A welcome sight, Drakken decided.

"At any rate, the Biometric Power Converter is in no way necessary to our plan," Drakken said. He stroked the tiny device between its first two spines to ease the blow of what he'd just told it, only then discovering how tremulous his hands still were. Tremulous and feather-light, as if his arms ended in air or maybe strips of Velcro. "It was simply a diversion."

Now _that _was a statement worthy of an evil grin, and Drakken unleashed the full force of his, with a minimum of oral trembling. Athena grinned back, but her eyes didn't get caught up in the celebration. Shego's had already narrowed themselves down again.

"So - now what?" Athena asked.

She might as well have showered potpourri around the lair, its fragrance drowning out the mildewed stench. Drakken's entire chest shivered with the question, with the wait for his response. He crafted it and gave it a thorough once-over before he delivered it to her.

"The next step comes when - _not _'if', Athena, so don't even take me there! - _when _Athena wins Freshman of the Month at Friday's assembly! Then we shall blast a hole in Middleton High's roof, make a dramatic entrance, and stage a kidnapping!" Drakken put his hand to his mouth to make sure he didn't drool out the words. Imagining himself hovering above all two-thousand-and-then-some members of Middleton High's student body, cowing them into submission with his now-intimidating voice, the voice of someone who deserved respect - well, it was even better than realizing he got to finally strike back at that ceiling he'd stared at from a pinned-down position so many times in his four years there, begging it for help he never got.

Shego lifted a hand. "Wait - is this gonna turn into one of those stupid Rube-Goldberg-machine-type plots?"

Drakken revamped the glower and sent it her direction. He knew what she was referring too, of course. An intricate series of devices, made mostly from everyday objects, arranged at intervals such that disturbing the first object would send each subsequent one into motion, ultimately accomplishing a menial task. This plan was nothing like that - wherever she was going, he didn't appreciate it.

"It's not 'stupid' if it works, Shego," Drakken snapped at her.

"Guess not." It was the closest Drakken had ever seen Shego come to conceding, and he had only a moment to revel in it before she erased it with another flip of the waterfall of hair. "But when you get to talking about knocking down a row of dominoes so that they hit one end of a see-saw - yeah, and then on the other end of the seesaw is a pin that goes up, pops a balloon, and drops a lug nut on the remote. There's something to be said for just picking it up and pressing the button yourself."

Drakken fully planned on scolding her, but "GGNNNNG!" was the only combination of letters to report for active duty.

Athena to the rescue. "So - we'll be kidnapping - me?"

"Yes, Athena. _Thank you_, Athena." Drakken nodded - maybe a _touch _indulgently - at his creation.

"Why?" Shego said.

"Because we've heard of her," Drakken said with a wiggle of his eyebrow. The movement brought him back to full operating capacity, and he repeated it twice for good measure. "And _she _is now Middleton High's biggest threat to our plan - not Kim Possible."

"Sick." Shego breathed it out like a compliment, like a ray of light in the unvarying darkness and decay of the lair. Supervillains were supposed to hate sunlight - or at least everything it represented - though if Drakken were completely honest with himself, he'd only ever gotten up to the level of ignoring it. And now after a year of only watching it on screens. . .

What Drakken wouldn't give for a nice huge patch of sunlight to ignore.

"I know," Drakken said, and his fists couldn't stay still, had to orbit around each other like a double planet in some exotic, unexplored galaxy. "Really takes a sledgehammer to the self-esteem, doesn't it?"

"And then what?" Athena said. Her gaze drifted away from Drakken's in a manner reminiscent of a leaf in the gutter, despite the fact he only had about three inches of height on her.

Still, at least she was looking at him. And listening.

"And then Kim Possible will show up to rescue her, of course." Drakken let his own eyes roll, and it instantly turned him into a conduit for pure electrical current. No wonder Shego did it so often. "When she arrives, we take her captive and reveal that Athena was never her friend! That she was always programmed to bring her down!"

"Oh," Athena said. "Cool."

Something was still off about this, and Drakken was prepared to ask her what could possibly be wrong - truly, he was going to - when Shego cut in (almost literally). "And _then _what?"

Drakken blinked at all the sharp angles his sidekick had suddenly pointed his way. "Then she'll be our prisoner."

"Uh-huh. And _then _what?"

_Then I'll be safe._

No, he was never going to say that.

Shego whooshed up from her chair and stood next to him, too close and too tall. "Please tell me there's a plan beyond just breaking Kimmy's heart."

Ohhhh, for the love of nuclear medicine! First his Plan was too complicated - and now it was too _simple_?

_I don't know _was the scientific answer, but that would never fly with Shego, and villainy was as much an art as it was a science. It was time to get in contact with his artistic side.

Drakken cleared his throat, stretched his vocal cords and stuffed them full of his evil and his temper and his pure meanness, and thankfully the emerging cackle held steady. "Once we have removed Kim Possible from the picture, we shall be free to pursue any avenue of evil that we so choose!" He finished with an embellished upward thrust of his finger that would surely have earned him a unanimous 10.0 score in the Supervillain Olympics, if such a thing existed. Now there was a service Jack Hench could have easily provided, not that Drakken was about to suggest it to him. The slimeball would likely steal the idea, claim it as his own, and not even pay Drakken royalties.

"Uh-huh," Shego said. Flat. Unimpressed. "So, in other words, you got nothing?"

Drakken couldn't believe what he was hearing. This was his Plan, the one they'd worked on for over a month now, with her right behind him every step of the way. Oh, she was still behind him now, but with her breath hot on his nape and the toe of her shoe kicked into his ankle. If this fell apart, there'd be another bottomless pit waiting for him.

All this time, all this dedication, and now she was just chomping away at it like it was a jawbreaker? All she could do was gnaw and nag. And how did anyone expect students to remember that those words were spelled nothing alike?

_Gnaw and nag. Nag and gnaw. Nag gnaw. Nag-gnaw. Naggnaw - _

"Magma!" Drakken burst out.

To his immense satisfaction, a crease formed in Shego's perfect pale forehead. "Beg your pardon?"

"What if, after this is over, we fly to - to _Wisconsin_! - laser drill into the Earth, cover the whole place in magma, and rename it 'Drakkenville'?"

Shego passed a hand across the crease. "We've _got _to work on your naming system. But, eh, at least it's a start." Pause. "Why Wisconsin?"

Drakken gathered every ounce, every _quark _of villain-sophistication he possessed and slipped it into a close-shouldered, composed shrug. It smoothed away the words _it was the first place that came to mind _and gave him better ones to say in their stead: "It's as good a place as any." Unfortunately, then "And I love cheese curds!" slipped out. But, as Shego said, it was a start.

Even Shego's mouth twitched, and Athena giggled like a wind-chime again. "I've got to check my student e-mail," she said. She nudged around Drakken with her elbow and took his place at the console.

And for a second, Dr. Drakken, so great and loquacious - which sounded a lot nicer than "babbly" - was struck speechless. He was staring down through a microscope lens at a raw sample of safety that he had created, the way scientists two years ago had created Oganesson. Now the challenge was in getting it to hold its form, protecting it from contamination.

("Contamination" here meaning "Kim Possible.")

"Oh, wow," Athena said. "Um - Dr. Drakken?"

Drakken whipped his head in her direction so fast he was sure something was going to hurt in the morning. "Yes?"

"I - um - I _am _going to be Freshman of the Month."

How she said that without at least _trying _to do a cartwheel, Drakken would never know. She sounded every bit the search engine again, complete with toneless tone, and she ducked her head so that her purple braid clacked softly against a face that reminded him of a treed cat. Minus the whiskers, of course.

Drakken smiled at her, and smiled, and smiled, unafraid of whatever mushroom spores he could have been inhaling. After Friday, this was all going to be over. At _last _it would be over.

"Athena, this is perfect!" he hollered. Mushiness filled his insides the way it did every Christmas when he watched _Snowman Hank_, and somehow it still felt like power.

"Yeah." Athena glanced at the screen one more time and reached across the console to give Drakken's hand a squeeze. "Perfect."

It wasn't long before she'd bounced off to the stasis chamber for the night. Drakken recognized that perky little stride, although in Athena's version, the self-assurance wasn't as highly concentrated or as hackle-hiking. It wasn't so much that she'd snuffed _out _the spark that made Kim Possible - _possible_, Drakken mused. It was more like she'd stolen it.

_Stolen _it.

Energy spasmed through Drakken's limbs, and he knocked himself sideways into the wall. Pain thudded in his non-scarred cheek, but he barely felt it. He could only stare at the Biometric Power Converter where it rested, near-abandoned, on the side of the console. Underestimated. Unconsidered. Unsuspected.

So - incredibly - brilliant.

In the next minute, Drakken couldn't have told where he was or what he was doing, whether he felt the Biometric Power Converter's spines between his fingers because he was holding it or because he just remembered it. Inside his marvelous Rube-Goldberg-machine brain, the first domino toppled over. And the plan that couldn't have gotten any better? It just did.


	9. Assembly

Kim Possible stared at the bulletin-board-sign in front of Middleton High - _Join us tonight for an AWARDING experience! _\- and tried not to let all her hope gurgle out of her.

There was no way she was making it onto the honor roll _this _semester, not with that social-studies test she'd C-plussed right after the craziness with the electric eels broke loose. Mom and Dad had passed a look between them when Kim had handed it to them across the table, and it wasn't disappointment. It was the _do-we-TELL-this-poor-girl-that-her-skirt-is-caught-in-her-underwear? _look Kim had exchanged a dozen times with her cheerleader friends back in middle.

So - yeah, no honor roll. Probably also a neg on the Physical Education award, which for Kim had always meant cheerleading, not straight-up track-and-field. Perfect Attendance wouldn't mean much when school had only been in session for a little over a month, and Kim was pretty sure she'd clocked up enough tardies to push even _that _out of her reach. But there was still the Freshman of the Month Award, Kim told herself - for the student who "worked the hardest" and "showed the most improvement." She had broken into an actual sweat doing homework last night.

As soon as Awards Night was announced, Kim had run straight home, where she'd taken down an Oh Boyz poster and moved her calendar to a different wall to make room for a trophy shelf or a ribbon. If those blank spaces stayed blank, it was going to be _the _most embarrassing thing she'd ever had to face in the privacy of her own head.

It wasn't like she thought she was some kind of untouchable goddess. At least half a dozen supervillains would've disagreed, but - _hello, like I'm totally going to listen when someone who wants to rename the country after themselves tells me I've got an ego problem? _She was just used to accomplishing things and, not to brag, she was used to those things paying off. Since high school had started, it was like everyone used a different currency she'd never heard of before.

And Kim didn't know how to deal. Not with that, at least. She knew how to work harder, push farther, bear down more intensely, grit her teeth and run another mile. So far, all she had "accomplished" that way was making it to her bus stop on time that morning.

She'd sunk gratefully into the always-ready seat beside Ron and returned his high-five with about half the joy he put into it. It had been impossible to _not _notice Athena, sitting at the front of the bus being mobbed by a group of cheerleaders in their elegant gold-and-white uniforms. She'd looked over one girl's body-glitter-sprayed shoulder at Kim and mouthed, _Sorry._

_What am I supposed to do with THAT?_

If it had been a supervillain, Kim could have hurled a punch. If it had been Bonnie, she could have hurled an insult. But this was _Athena_, and her eyes were really, truly, first-day-wearing-retainers pained. No way was Kim going to throw anything at that fragile little face, even if it _did _look a little stronger now.

Kim shook her head now and hardened her grip on her backpack until her knuckles felt like tiny baseballs. She couldn't stay still for long in this crowd. The Middleton High hallway sitch wasn't _exactly _like the steer-stampede Kim had once saved an Army base from, but it was close. The school itself stood up stern and square, in amazingly good shape for being older than her parents, and it inspired Kim to gather up her shoulders and swing the double doors open.

There was still a river of people to slog through on her way to study hall, and Kim had more than one near-miss with a locker door that would have knocked her to the floor to examine the soles of everyone's shoes. She was used to being on the slightly-smaller-than-average side from middle school. What she _wasn't _used to were the hottie boys who had emerged on the other side of their growth spurts and were now only a few zits and a voice-crack or two away from passing as grown men. Kim had spent a large part of last summer watching some of them on lifeguard-duty at the pool and praying they would notice her in her new, Dad-approved-but-still-cute tankini.

Now she just prayed they wouldn't step on her.

First-period study hall wasn't _so _bad - Ron sat across the aisle from her and grinned entire motivational speeches at her without saying a word while Kim pulled out her homework and double-and-triple-checked every answer. Second period mostly disappeared into a blur of computing variables and identifying slopes. Except for the moment Kim made the mistake of looking at Bonnie just in time to see her tap lightly at her graphing calculator - no doubt to avoid ruining her manicure - and tossing a note onto Athena's desk. Kim was kind of ashamed to admit how much she hoped Barkin would do some kind of quarterback-interception on it before it reached Athena. She could only imagine what kind of "disciplinary action" passing notes in Barkin's class warranted, and she felt mean enough today to enjoy watching Bonnie get hers.

Athena slipped open the note. And smiled.

Kim snapped her eyes back down to the x-y intercepts.

Third and fourth period were Athena-empty, which gave Kim some time to try packing away the whack sensation that she'd been snapped with a rubber band. Language Arts consisted of diagramming sentences while Barkin hawk-watched them all from over that lovingly-framed photo of his cat that Kim couldn't picture him actually holding. And Earth Science? It was almost _too _easy. Kim would have traded it for Intro to Chem Lab and its danger-potential in a heartbeat.

When the lunch bell rang, Kim almost made a handspring for the doors and bolted before she could hear the snickering that was probably breaking out behind her. Five minutes of peace passed before Athena entered the cafeteria with a trail of sophomores-and-up, as if she were campaigning for prom queen two years early. She brought them to a stop in front of Kim and Ron's table and pinched her eyebrows at them until, mercifully, they left, and Kim was left staring into the worried brown eyes of the girl she didn't WANT to see as a threat. But there was no convincing her self-preservation instincts, and she could feel her legs tightening on the plastic bench beneath her.

"Hi, Athena," she said.

As soon as the words squeezed through her lips, Kim's whole brain cringed. _Sheesh_. She'd sounded less strained negotiating hostage situations.

The worried eyes flickered down to her lunch tray for about thirty seconds. It took Kim that long to realize that the thing swirling in her chest was regret. "Hey, Kim. What's the sitch?" Athena said when she'd lifted her head.

"Not much. With you?"

"I just wanted to come eat lunch with my actual friends," Athena said. "Those cheerleaders can be such a pain in the neck, you know?" She flicked the purple mini-braid that Kim had tamed and dyed herself.

Was this how Frankenstein felt?

Kim stabbed her fork into her hot lunch, and she didn't think the mystery meat's rock-hardness was completely to blame when a tine snapped. It was the only way she could keep from blurting that she would have given anything to have them be a pain in _her_ neck.

Especially during PE, when they were instructed-by-whistle to race in laps around the track while Bonnie, Athena, and the others glowed in cheerleader garb on the sidelines, practicing kicks and flips. By the time the whistle had screeched for the final race, Kim's ankles were on fire and her gaze on the finish line. She slapped her legs until the track beneath her seemed to hit back and even _her _never-quit lungs were having trouble distributing the rubber-scented air she took in. End result - she pulled into a close second right behind a sophomore girl with heron-legs and a carefully-dipped neckline that was about level with Kim's head.

At least it wasn't Athena for once, but Kim's face still burned as she spun toward the locker room. If those kicks and flips had been allowed in track-and-field runs, she would have made first, easy.

Last-period social-studies was also Athena-less, and it did lift Kim's spirits a little to find herself CLEARLY the most engaged student in the room - most everybody else was headed toward their post-school zonk-fest. Cell phones hid beneath desks. Heads nodded onto folded arms. Kim was pretty sure the freshman boy behind her with the natural-perm of a hairdo, the boy she'd heard somebody call Ron Reiger, actually started snoring.

Kim twisted in her seat to check on _her _Ron in the back of the room. He appeared to be playing connect-the-dots with his map of the Midwestern United States until something in his pocket jumped. Ron jerked upright and patted the pocket, whispering something to it. _Right,_ his mouth said. _Focusing._

Day two with Rufus as his study-buddy, and his study habits had actually risen out of the barely-passing gutter. Kim _almost _wasn't surprised that a naked mole rat had turned out to be exactly the tutor Ron had always needed.

The bell rang at the same moment an announcement came over the loudspeaker reminding students to gather in the gym for Awards Night. Kim was the first one to the door, even though she'd rather have stayed in her seat and committed every aspect of municipal governments to memory. No one was going to catch _her _slouching around like she'd already flunked out. Mr. Barkin herded the rest of the kids into line with his grizzly-bear voice alone.

The gym had been converted to a full-fledged auditorium when Kim and her class trooped in. A stage had been unfolded from the back wall and decked out with gold-and-white balloons and confetti. Matching streamers curled down from the ceiling, and Ron batted at one like a kitten until a transferred-from-a-different-middle-school girl rolled her eyes and got him blushing all the way out to the tips of his ginormous ears. Someone had even sprayed air freshener over the sneakers-and-sweat aroma as if they could trick everyone into thinking they really were entering some luxurious mountain resort.

Didn't work on Kim, but her nostrils sure appreciated it. She slipped into a seat and rubbed the tension-spot on the back of her neck. Ron sprawled in a chair on one side of her at his usual level-zero coordination. Kim had her hand out to reserve the chair on her other side when Ron poked her and shook his head. She followed the point of his too-big finger down to the front row of seats, where the cheerleaders sat in a shimmery clique - Athena among them.

_Okay. Well, that hurts just a LITTLE._

Still - it was _so _not the drama. Kim's hand fluttered lightly from the chair, looking a lot more smooth than she felt inside. She forced a smile and waved at the back of Athena's head, which never once turned, before staring straight ahead at Barkin-the-bear behind the podium. He'd already launched into a speech about how this school year had gotten off to a great start and how he was proud of all of them - although listening to him growl, you'd think they'd all just been busted for smoking in the courtyard. Surrounded by bouncing streamers and happily-wandering balloons, Barkin looked about as out-of-place as a stuffed moose head in a mansion foyer.

The assembly was long and painfully predictable, spiraling backward from seniors to freshmen. _Where's a supervillain when you need one? _Kim wondered as Bonnie shimmied herself up to the stage to receive her third plaque. Surprise, she'd swept the sophomore class for Academic Excellence and Extracurricular Participation and snagged a National Fitness Award along the way.

It wasn't a huge surprise to Kim, not hearing her name called once the audience's attention finally straggled down to the freshmen. She clapped for Tara and Zita Flores and some genius-child named Justine Flanner when they took the stage, and tried to make sense of the burn in the back of her throat. It wasn't hot enough to be resentment and definitely wasn't spreading quickly enough to be the need for a justice-smackdown. No, this was new.

"And, last but not least," Barkin bellowed, "is our Freshman of the Month Award."

Only then did Kim let herself lean forward.

"We have many outstanding and talented freshmen this school year," Barkin said, still in that _you're-all-under-arrest _voice, "so this was a difficult decision for the faculty to make. But finally we decided upon one young lady -"

Kim crept to the edge of her seat. _Okay, so it's a girl. Big deal_, she scolded herself.

" - who has approached the beginning of high school with dedication and grit. After a rough first day, she pulled her act together both academically and socially. What's more, just a few days ago, she had the courage to take on a wanted criminal caught breaking into the Upperton Biology Research Lab."

Kim felt her jaw drop. Tara, who'd been on the cheer squad with her in middle school, turned around in her seat and smiled at Kim with a congratulations in her soft blue eyes.

_Yikes. So it's NOT just in my head._

"Although she was unsuccessful in apprehending the thief, she kept herself and her friends alive and uninjured and, in the process, she demonstrated the Middleton Mad Dog initiative and spunk!" Barkin yelled. "Please join me in an enthusiastic round of applause for - Athena Smith!"

The crowd roared as if from underwater.

Kim fell back against her seat, sucked in a breath, and held it in until it wouldn't come out as a sigh. She shut her eyes before any protest could register in them. The last thing she saw before her lids met was the question-mark pucker of Tara's forehead.

A stunning decision? _So _not. But it had somehow still sneaked up on Kim and sucker-punched her. Not many things _could _do that, and that left her breathless as much as any other part of this.

Kim forced her arms not to fold as she scanned the auditorium. Her legs burned with not-quite-anger. Athena's sparkle-smile, which could be seen from all the way across the room, wasn't helping matters any. It should've. She should've been happy that the only kid to have a worst first day than she did had rebounded so nicely.

Except it had felt way better when she was the one offering Athena rescue.

It was what she did. She could have stood in the middle of some mad-scientist-created hurricane and not been blown back an inch, but to watch the girl she had saved from terminal nothingness stride across the stage with her hands on her cheerleading-uniformed hips?

Oh, gosh, that was SO not her idea of a fun challenge.

It didn't happen exactly that way. Athena rose from her seat and floated to the stage as if she were receiving an Academy Award. She didn't saunter, didn't pull an _oh, yes, of course, who ELSE would you have chosen?_ She was just owning her stuff.

And all Kim could think about was how fiercely lame that empty spot on her wall was going to look when she climbed the stairs tonight. Her heart was clopping out one beat at a time, slow and painful, rattling the drawers of a file cabinet inside herself that Kim had only opened a few times in her life.

She felt the sloppy warmth of Ron's fingers wrap themselves, with minimal coordination, around her own. He passed a sympathetic look her way even as he out-cheered everyone else in the room.

Well, duh. He was _used _to being the under-appreciated sidekick.

Kim suddenly wanted to apologize to him for every spare inch of the spotlight that she'd hoarded.

Mr. Barkin bowed to Athena like she was in line for the British throne and swept away to let her step up to the podium, which looked a whole lot bigger without Barkin behind it. A _speech_? Was she going to give a _speech_?

If this had been elementary school, Kim would have stuck her fingers in her ears. As it was, she shifted against the abrupt discomfort of her plastic seat. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Maybe Athena would give a shout-out to the girl who'd saved her from terminal nothingness.

"Um, wow. This is amazing. Thank you guys so much," Athena said. She glanced down at her watch, the only hint of her former head-hanging self that Kim had seen over the past two weeks. "I'd just like to say -"

Whether she would've thanked Kim or not, nobody was ever gonna find out. At that exact moment, there was a giant crunching sound as the ceiling ripped away, the wind chucking plaster into Kim's face.

The auditorium screamed as one. Kim whipped around and found herself nose-to-rounded-nose with a dorky little dinner roll of a hovercraft hanging where the roof used to be.

_You HAD to wish for supervillains, didn't you, Kim?_

Yeah. She'd had to. And as a shoulders-back figure stirred in the hovercraft, she had a pretty good idea she knew which one.

There was no mistaking the lanky blueness wrapped in darker blue, the obnoxious neon-lime button that blazed from the black belt, or the thunder-clap laugh that forced its way across the room. Even after only one up-and-close-and-personal encounter with the guy, Kim knew it had to be Dr. Drakken. The guy she took down at the end of seventh grade. It seemed so long ago to her.

Probably seemed even longer to him.

The last time she'd seen his face, it had been scrunched and folded, ready to launch a toddler-tantrum. Now it was puckered into a smile so chubby-cheeked it would have dragged a snort out of Kim - if she hadn't caught the shrewd, angry gleam in his eye. Even THAT probably wouldn't have done it, if he hadn't been directing it over an entire auditorium of innocent people.

Adrenaline coursed through Kim's limbs, and she almost sighed with relief as her muscles clenched. She moved like she was in a dream she controlled, a lucid dream. Mom had made that her neurology word of the week at the dinner table when the kids were little, and from the first time she went on a people-will-die-if-I-get-this-wrong mission, it had perfectly described the state that came over her then.

Drakken smacked at his dashboard until it spit a green beam of light across the room. With a haughty tilt of his head, he strolled out into the light so that _he _could hover, too. The man looked smaller than Kim remembered him, and she didn't think it was just due to the inch-and-a-half she'd picked up over the course of two summers. Whatever prison chow they'd been feeding him, it wasn't enough to keep up with his fidgety calorie-burning.

It wasn't that she was scared of Drakken, not in a horror-movie-villain-in-a-hockey-mask way. Nah, to Kim, Drakken had always given off the vibe of that mountain lion she ran into during her flash-flood rescue in Santa Fe last year. Same scruffy-stray look to him. Same massive potential to tear you apart still not bigger than the fear soaking him. Same eyes leaping from item to item, trying to decide whether to fight or haul tail out of there. Same ability to go from snarling to mewling in a blink.

And the same feeling that you could talk him down if he could just understand what you were saying - but then you realized you were trying to reason with a scared animal.

Drakken snapped his head toward Kim. The face that had been all over the newspaper in pictures boxed in next to hers was at least three shades paler than she remembered it being, accentuating the black skin sagging beneath his eyes. His chin tilted upward and outward in a shelf, and Kim could see how tightly it was clenched.

Yeah. This was revenge. It thrilled all over his face. And Kim hadn't done a lot of research on prison life, but she knew it was rare for it to make people nicer.

"Ah, Middleton High!" Drakken was completely in snarl-mode now, blasting the room with his voice-built-for-a-way-bigger-man. "Yes, scream and cower! Hide! Fear! For now, you are in the company of greatness!"

Kim felt her eyes roll. The guy may have looked ten pounds skinnier, but his ego hadn't lost an ounce.

A second person hiked herself from the hovercraft and crossed the beam of light - a woman who could've easily been a model for volume-enhancing shampoo. "Yeah, and in other news," she said, "this guy also showed up."

If Kim hadn't recognized the hair, she could have ID'd the snark from the other end of the gym. Had to be Shego, the unquestionable brawn to Drakken's questionable brain. Kim had actually kind of hoped she _wouldn't _show up. Shego was the offline equivalent of an Internet troll who knew all the right buttons to push for max emotional chaos. She wore a harlequin jumpsuit that fit her like an extra layer of skin. It would've looked fashion-hopeless on anyone else, and the fact that Shego pulled it off was another point AGAINST her as far as Kim was concerned.

Drakken tried to pin Shego with a glare that, unsurprisingly, she wriggled out of. "Oh, hardy-har-har. I get it," Drakken said, his own attempt at sarcasm fraying more with every syllable. "You're hilarious. Why don't you actually _help _me, Miss - Smirky - Gigglemouth?"

Kim didn't hold back her snort that time. At least jail time hadn't expanded Drakken's burn-vocab any.

"Um, excuse me?" Bonnie called from the row of petrified cheerleaders. "Who the heck are you?" Kim could see the indecision in her lips, wondering if they should let loose some more screams at the guy who demolished their ceiling or cock back in disgust at the utter _loser _who floated in front of her now.

Kim groaned even as the familiar, welcome energy turned her body into a rigid blade. Drakken would be _entirely _too happy to answer that.

Sure enough, Drakken lit up like a phone screen and poked his ever-important index finger into the air. "Since you asked - I am Dr. Drakken! Mad scientist extraordinaire! World-famous supervillain! And soon-to-be ruler of the Planet Earth!"

_Mwa-ha-ha_, Kim thought absently. She was already eyeballing the wall, trying to calculate how high she'd have to hit with a running start to launch herself into whatever low-budget tractor beam Drakken was wielding.

He didn't let her down in the _mwa-ha-ha _department, either, the maniacal laughter ringing in the air until Kim could feel the rest of the audience pulling together in confusion over whether or not they were any danger of anything other than being laughed to death. With Drakken, it really was anybody's guess.

"What are you even doing here?" asked a senior football-team-member whose name Kim didn't know. She'd just seen Bonnie with him in the halls, hanging him off her arm like he was a Rolex.

"Wonderful question!" Drakken stabbed the finger upward again. "I am here to kidnap the only teenager in the world who could foil my latest ingenious plan!"

Kim nodded along with him, her heart thundering to match Drakken's voice. The file cabinet snapped shut, leaving room for her to survey the odds at a glance. Yeah, Drakken was a big goof, but he was still glowering around the auditorium from under the spot where his eyebrows had puffed together, and somewhere on him, he was carrying a weapon that had just crumpled their roof up like a wad of paper. If something freaked him out and he fired that thing, it could plunge the school below sea level. Or worse, if it hit a b-ball hoop and ricocheted -

The idea ripped her hand free from Ron's and got her sprinting down the aisle. The heat of the run burned her thighs and smoldered in her calves and brought Kim a lot closer to happiness than she'd been all day. Her brain was consumed by a chant of _save them, save them._

It was the only thing she knew for sure she could do anymore.

She came to a controlled stop in the center of the gym, in front of Drakken, and stared up into his sickly-green light ray. "All right, Drakken," she said. Evenly. "Turn down the drama. I'm here. Leave the rest of these people alone."

From the front row, Kim heard a couple of the cheerleaders gasp. She didn't even have the chance to hope that she'd won some points with them for sacrificing herself.

Not that it was much of a sacrifice. Knowing Drakken, he'd probably lock her in a second-story room with a window and be utterly flabbergasted when she escaped.

Drakken's mouth went into an O too precise and practiced to be genuine. He knew something she didn't, and just considering that made Kim want to rear back and hurl her backpack at him. She slid it from her back, and he flinched.

"Oh, Kim Possible, I didn't mean you!" Drakken rushed through his line before she could ram him with her homework and then scowled, as if she'd stolen his thunder. "No! I came for Miss Athena!"

The lucid dream became a nightmare.

"She's a better crime fighter than you, you know," Drakken added. He rolled the words around like they tasted good and then looked down at Kim with a sneer. A sneer that had never meant a thing to Kim before.

"Yeah," Shego added. She leaned a casual arm against Drakken's. "I mean, she came _way _closer to stopping me than you did, Princess."

Kim felt two hot spots break out on her cheeks. She'd learned super-early in her crime-fighting career how to stop herself from going pale. Blushing was a lot harder, and she couldn't tell if the September-afternoon sun was hiding it from these two creeps. Her head cranked, on autopilot, in Athena's direction.

The girl had frozen onstage, her knuckles curled white around the edges of the podium. Horror smeared across her face like misapplied makeup. Something weird - something almost resigned, as if she knew it was only a matter of time before she got good enough to be a threat - flickered in and out of Athena's eyes too fast for a camera to capture before they caught up with the rest of her.

Kim refused to swallow. Drakken would count that as a victory, and there was no way in _heck _he was winning anything today. This was _Drakken_. Dweeby, hopeless Drakken. If she could just distract him or outrage him somehow -

"So what _is _this big, important plan, Drakken?" Kim asked with as much interest as she could fake. Cliche, yeah. But it tended to work.

Especially on dweeby, hopeless Drakken. He pulled himself pencil-straight and glittered his gaze over Kim. "Well, as a matter of fact, it's quite brilliant, even by my standards! You see, the _real _reason we nee -"

"Drakken!" Shego drove her elbow into Drakken's ribs so hard Kim could hear the breath leave him. "Hello? Dude? Oversharing much?"

"Oh. Yes. Right." Drakken blinked, his eyes coming back from some haunted place where Kim couldn't follow them, and he shook his head. He'd gotten a haircut since their encounter last summer, and it wasn't doing his long, egg-shaped face any favors.

Before Kim could hate the Bonnie-style thought that hit her brain, Drakken had already rolled his shoulders back again and bellowed, "Henchmen, attack!" He paused, glanced at Shego, thin beads of sweat popping out on his forehead. "You _did _go out and hire some henchmen, right?"

Kim would have laughed out loud if Mr. Barkin hadn't been making cardiac-arrest sounds at her side. Instead, she dropped to the floor in a squat and tensed her right leg, readying for a sweep move guaranteed to topple any henchman.

"Nah. I hired some hench_women_," Shego replied. Two fingers shot to her mouth and she whistled. Black blurs began to fall from the sky.

"Oh." Drakken shrugged. "Same thing."

_Huh. Have to give him points for that._

And - yikes. Kim was prepared to take on Drakken's huge-but-slow, lumbering henchmen who reminded her of photos of oxen she'd seen in history textbooks. Not so much the sleek, slippery black-clad forms that poured down from above and smacked into the floor like hailstones.

Her heart was now thumping so hard that it pounded the pain straight out of Kim's chest. She smiled as she shoved a fist toward the fastest ninja's face. When the ninja ducked, just like Kim had expected her to do, Kim brought a knee up into her stomach. Unlike on Drakken's henchmen, there was barely any extra anything to give way, but Kim did feel a ridge of muscle sink. She popped the heels of both hands onto the ninja's gasp-weakened chest and toppled her to the floor.

A second ninja jumped all like-a-boss over the dazed first and came at Kim in a flurry of black silk. The ninja hiked up her heel, and Kim hooked her own ankle around it and downed the ninja with a twitch of her leg. The woman didn't make a sound as she joined her buddy in a heap - also very un-henchman-like.

And a bit disappointing for Kim. She'd grown to enjoy the sound of henchmen-groans, hired-muscle grunts always got a grin out of her, and she absolutely _lived _to hear a villain's inevitable verbal temper tantrum.

In the front row, a cute, old-enough-to-have-shaved-this-morning guy looked up at Kim, and even as she had to sweep her eyes across the gym again, his locked on. A glow started in the base of her stomach - abruptly winked out when he leaned over and whispered loudly to his equally-hot friend, "Hey, isn't that the girl from the electric eel video?"

Kim whipped around and smashed a fist into what she estimated to be the third ninja's nose. It was the hardest hit she'd ever delivered. Without feeling a thing, she heard what sounded like a squeaky floorboard giving way and the woman hissing a breath, and as reflexes-only-fast as she kept moving, Kim sensed something inside her stalling out. Had to, or she would have sent Drakken's entire hired army to the nearest ER, and THAT was several notches past anything she enjoyed.

A few feet down, Athena was also throwing punches and swiveling her hips to kick at the ninjas advancing on her. The relief Kim almost always got knowing someone had her back didn't soothe its way down her throat this time. It felt more like she'd swallowed a handful of toothpicks.

The entire auditorium gave an out-of-sync-with-itself cheer. Kim didn't let herself wonder who it was meant for. Another ninja had appeared, slithering her arms toward Kim, and she dodged around Mr. Barkin, who had obviously entered his own personal Twilight Zone. With his wrinkle-free brown suit wrapped tight around his wrestler's chest, he looked like he could pick up a ninja by the hair and slam-dunk her into one of the basketball hoops. But his hands had started to shake so hard that he'd dropped the metal pointer he carried around with him - _like, seriously, who even still_ uses _those?_ \- and now it lay on top of the scuff marks and dust of ceiling plaster.

Honestly? Concerning. Kim would have stopped and given him her best passed-the-Red-Cross-class exam if it hadn't been for, uh, the ninja gearing up to throw a five-bladed star at her head.

Now _that _\- that was welcome. She'd left a lame and humiliating school assembly in the dirt a long time ago. Now she was in a kung fu virtual-reality game, and as long as she matched her moves to the ones she had memorized, she'd trample whatever enemy the vid system could throw at her.

Kim faked a subtle head-turn to the left. And - yep, the ninja's aim followed it. The star shot from her grip, and Kim threw herself to the right and had the woman's throwing arm bent almost double behind her by the time the star buried itself in the gym wall.

A ninja with legs like a supermodel's jockeyed in front of Athena and grabbed the front of her shirt.

_As if_. The girl raised her hands like a pair of knives and chopped them down on her attacker's shoulders, sending her staggering backward.

A different ninja leaped for Kim, whisking a white sparring-pole from side to side. As she sailed over Kim's head, Kim pretended to duck, only to jolt upright a few seconds later, driving her head smack into the woman's sternum. The impact throbbed in her forehead, adrenaline splashing her like a blast of cold water.

Breathing easier than she had all day, Kim straddled the shoulders that Athena had just karate-chopped and began to wrench at Model Ninja's face mask from behind. It didn't budge, and the woman lashed backward with an arm that missed Kim by a fraction of an inch. Kim leap-frogged away, using the ninja's back as her lily pad, before those creepy-long fingers could get a hold of her.

"Kim!" someone cried. Kim twisted around to see Athena running her direction with cheeks the color of almond milk and an armful of torn-down streamers. With a cheerleader's gotta-get-this-perfect grace, Athena tangled the nearest ninja's arms and legs in two thick streamers and tied a snug-fit third one over the woman's eyes. The ninja bucked against the floor like she was doing upside-down push-ups and Kim said a silent _thank-you-thank-you_ to Middleton High for splurging on something stronger than crepe paper.

The ninja with the stars freed another one from her waist-holster and heaved it Athena's way. Athena swung her backpack forward to shield her face in one electric-fast move. The star bounced off and veered across the ninja's sleeve, leaving her forearm open and trickling red. Someone screamed, and Kim got the thrill-pumping feeling that it was probably Drakken himself.

Moaning, the ninja who'd tried to kick Kim pushed off the ground - and immediately fell again when Kim round-housed her in the ribs.

Kim took a step backward and rubbed at her arms, surprised to find I've-got-ten-seconds-to-make-it-to-class-before-the-bell-rings dampness on her palms. She frowned. Yeah, she was used to getting sweaty on a world-saving mission - call it an occupational hazard. But it had never broken out on her hands before, and she didn't think it would start now.

Especially not since this had been easy. Almost TOO easy. Kim's pride stepped to the side long enough for her to admit that. For a ninja attack squad selected by _Shego _of all people, they had folded way too fast to a couple of freshmen - even talented freshmen.

Kim snapped her head Drakken's direction to search him for signs of a trick. It'd be all over him - whatever his strong suits _were_, that had never been one of them. He stood in the tractor beam with his hands curled onto miserably-narrow hips, his round face bobbing above his beanpole-body like a leering balloon. There was absolutely nothing scary about him.

Except that he was alone.

That sunk in at the same moment Kim heard Athena scream. The chocolate-rich sound lunged for Kim and dug its fangs into her. Forget Drakken - she spun to see Shego in the center of the auditorium, one arm coiled casually around Athena's neck as if they'd been best friends for life. But every wiry inch of her rippled with a threat that would have worked even _without _the flame-ball of plasma Kim barely managed to dodge.

"Sorry, Kimmy," Shego said - every bit as though she were addressing some overly-eager-to-help preschooler. She squeezed Athena closer to her with a jerk of her elbow. "Your friend here's got a playdate with us."

Kim felt the anger grab hold of her. Talk about _welcome_. "Look, as much as I'd love for Athena to give you some help fashion-wise - " the words were like tiny smoke bombs, and she loved watching them cloud Shego's face - "I'm afraid I can't let you do that."

Shego let out the laugh that always seemed to chill the air around her. "'Let' us? Oh, that's cute, kid. Mommy should put that in your school scrapbook."

"She still thinks she's part of this," Drakken added in what was practically a coo. He and Shego exchanged a worse-than-unsettling look of agreement.

Shego marched long-legged toward the tractor beam, dragging Athena, whose stylin' sneakers screamed a protest against the lacquered floor. Instead of Ron's wild bulge, Athena's eyes had gone flat with horror.

Kim scanned the room for anything she could use as a projectile. The first thing she touched was Barkin's pointer. How decidedly NOT helpful.

_Wait a sec, though._ Kim tore through the tangle of stirring ninjas, punching at fabric until she found the white pole. It felt strong and sturdy in a way that firmed her insides up to match, its smooth surface broken only by faint little dips made for her fingers to rest in.

Her vision tunneled in on Athena, Kim took a step forward, the pole out in front of her like a sword. There was nothing now except her and her friend, nothing except the adult-mean-girl keeping them apart and the pole that could reunite them.

"Kim!" Athena coughed out from inside Shego's stranglehold. "Toss it to me! I can do that move like I did at the research lab!"

Kim took another step, had the staff lifted, ready to toss it underhand. Sheesh, it looked so much like the one they used for the seventh-grade-PE pole-vault. The one every cheerleader had aced -

And then the next thing Kim knew, she was running toward Athena, driving the blunt end of the pole into the ground and flipping away from it.

The Freshman of the Month award stopped mattering right after Kim launched herself, way before her fingers missed Athena's. But by then, it was too late - she was already falling backward, still reaching for Athena, a _no, wait - I can still save you _jangling in her head like somebody's annoying ringtone.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

Shego had stepped into the tractor beam, taking poor Athena with her. She was getting smaller and farther away every second, and Kim wouldn't be able to help her or anyone else if she became a pancake on the gym floor.

She flopped herself over in midair and hit the ground on all fours. This time the sting did reverberate through her body, but it was nothing compared to Drakken's warped, wack laughter that he must have spent all morning practicing to buff it up to paralyze-a-gym-full-of-teenagers level. It kept going until he ran short of air, and the second he gasped some more in, he twiddled his scrawny fingers in a wave and yelled, "By-yyy-eee!" _Preteen much?_ Some other time, it might have sent Kim into hysterics.

The hovercraft sped up and vanished, and then they were gone. Drakken, Shego, the ninja henchwomen. And Athena.

Kim swiveled to see the Freshman of the Year Award, a rickety-looking glass thing, perched on the edge of the table still waiting to be handed out to some lucky kid. As she stared at it, she could almost feel Bonnie's perfect nails brushing against her skin, hear her crushed-SweeTart-of-a-voice whispering in Kim's ear - _You SO did not just do that, did you, K?_

"I _so _did," Kim said, and it was lost in the chattering conversations and general panic of everybody else in the auditorium.

A thickness she almost didn't recognize threatened to close off Kim's throat. She'd rather have faced ninja stars and Shego's plasma _simultaneously _than what she knew they meant.

Before Mr. Barkin could snap back to his ten-hut self again, Kim sprinted from the gym, one hand already busy with the Kimmunicator she wore on her opposite wrist. She was a jumble of weird things she thought she'd shed with pigtails, Cuddle Buddy pajamas, and the nickname "Tin Teeth." But give up? _Not a stinkin' chance._

Short black curls winked onto the screen. Kim started chattering away before Wade could even get his mouth open.

"Wade, Drakken and Shego have Athena." Wade's eyebrows jumped, and Kim didn't give him any silence to fill. "They yanked the roof right off the gym and kidnapped her. I need you to put out an APB on a blue man and a green woman, and make it clear that our major interest is in the girl with them - let's see, about five-foot-six, olive skin, black hair with a purple streak. See if you can get an energy lock on Drakken's devices so we can locate him. We'll need a construction crew to patch up the gym and maybe a trauma team, too - I think Mr. Barkin's having a nervous breakdown. And while you're at it, beep me Drakken's bank records - no, Shego's. She's the one with all the cash."

It wasn't Kim-on-a-mission she was hearing anymore - it was Mom-in-the-operating-room, throwing out requests for scalpels and clamps. Which was fine with Kim, because she wanted to reach out and slug her_self _almost as much as she did Drakken and Shego. Anything to keep her distance from that person who'd failed so hard in the gym five minutes ago.

Wade nodded, his fingers flying across his translucent keyboard, and gave Kim a look loaded with question marks. "Kim. . . are you okay?"

_Crud. Why'd he have to ask THAT?_

"Could be better," Kim said. To her horror, her voice snapped off like pencil lead. She pulled it back in and put a hand to the base of her neck.

Wade swallowed in that way that always made Kim notice his soft, chubby cheeks and his puberty-hasn't-paid-me-a-visit-yet pitch, that way that took him from the next-gen Einstein to a nine-year-old kid with comics stashed between textbooks on his bookshelf. Definitely didn't invite her to pour more stress out on him.

Kim flashed a sugary smile and hoped it didn't look as much like a cheap special effect on her as it did on Bonnie. "No big, though, Wade. Athena is who we need to worry about right now."

The curls bobbed, and Wade squinted at her as if he were trying to see the fine print in a software license agreement. He was the only person Kim knew who actually _read _those things the whole way through. "On it," he said, and the screen went as blank as the cleared-away space on Kim's wall was going to stay.

_Hello? So not the time._

Kim peeked around a door hinge, now attached to nothing, and took stock of the gym sitch. Sure, she _could _have walked back in and tried to start over. She could also have kicked her social life off a cliff and hoped it survived.

One glance at the gym was all the validation she needed. Bonnie had flounced from the first row out into the center of the auditorium like she'd blown in straight off a Hollywood set, and the pull of everyone else's eyes to her only seemed to confirm that. Her brown shag cut bounced like a fishing lure just above her shoulders, one hand pointing instructions at anyone within reach, the other resting against the slice of midriff bared by the cheerleading uniform that fit her in a way that basically talked anyone else out of even _trying_.

Kim's own shoulders ached to slump, but she leveled them and kept her arms tight at her sides as she shook her head.

Big surprise - the crowd was already lapping up whatever Bonnie told them, the way they had ever since she was in first and Kim in kindergarten. Bonnie had always had a fake perkiness ready for most of the student body, with a curled lip at the ready for bottom-scraping losers and a neck-arch she reserved for threats to her throne. A harsh pang went through Kim as she realized that Bonnie hadn't arched her neck Kim's direction since the first day of high school. She was playing an away-game now on Bonnie's home turf.

Kim sneaked another peek into the gym. Mr. Barkin was still on the stage, staring at the kids from the middle of whatever black hole he'd been pulled into, muttering something about the Taliban. Mom would have had a diagnosis on her tongue already.

Too bad Mom couldn't be here.

_All right, so - next best thing. School nurse._

Kim punched Kimmunicator buttons until her holo-map of the school flickered up and groaned as she traced her way to the spot marked with a Red Cross symbol. It WOULD have to be on the other side of the building.

On second thought, a good hard sprint through the hallways might have been exactly what Kim needed. The feel of her feet slapping against the floor qualified as pain relief for the encroaching headache. Charging straight into the safety of danger always did that to her.

All right - and the fact that she got to speed past a stern-faced hall monitor's waving hand and call, "Sorry! Emergency! I'm Kim Possible!" over her shoulder? Yeah, that was also a plus.

By the time Kim skidded to a halt in front of the half-open door with nurse's credentials etched into its glass, she was panting from her gut and loving every second of it. She never had more energy than when she should've been completely spent.

Kim poked into the nurse's office, where a man who looked only a few settled years older than Shego looked up with a wrinkle in his forehead. "Gym ceiling collapsed" were the only words needed to get him hustling out the door, nearly overturning a box of sterile gauze in the process. Kim caught it before it could crash to the floor and planted it back on the desk.

In spite of the squealing footsteps and crackling shouts of kids rushing back and forth, it suddenly went _way _too quiet. Kim blinked at the walls, the exact yellow-green shade a nurse's office should _never _have been, but she was seeing the yellow-coated paramedics called to Middleton Elementary when Liz Madison had broken her ankle on the last day of fifth grade trying out some cheerleader moves. The image painted itself way too clear across Kim's mind - how she'd been crouched next to Liz, telling her she'd read a book about how to set bones, the twist of fear on Liz's pain-pale face, and the bland expression of the paramedic who shooed Kim off the scene, telling her, "We've got it now, little girl. Relax."

Yeah. That was so not happening. Relaxing equaled losing it. Kim would have rather redecorated the entire office, checked every thermometer in the place for battery life - heck, even scrubbed down the germy floors.

Now that she was alone and off-the-clock, there was nothing to stand in the way of her remembering the pole clutched in her hands and how wrong it had looked in them, like a shade of nail polish that clashed _bad _with someone's skin tone but that they refused to take off. Or how she'd _felt _every kid in that auditorium expecting her to throw the thing to Athena and let her save herself. Or the barely-there nasty glint in Shego's eyes, as if she was saving her best for someone else.

Kim backed against the wall. Drakken had been about to squish her self-esteem AND her friend under the sole of his tiny boot.

_And look which one I chose._

A shadow passed over the nurse's doorway. For a not-a-chance moment, Kim hoped it was Drakken or Shego come back to reconsider who was worth abducting. She'd lock Drakken - or even Shego herself - in a wrestling hold and wouldn't let go until that electric-eel footage was scrubbed from everyone's brains. But, nah, she couldn't be so lucky - it was just a senior girl leaning vaguely on the half-open door, hands frantic at her phone's touch screen.

When a beeping sound chirped from the vicinity of her wrist, Kim's pulse jacked up to a place she finally recognized. She would have thrown her arms around Wade if he'd actually been there.

"You found Drakken?" Kim said, and then almost laughed out loud that she'd made it a question. Of _course _he'd found Drakken. The man trailed clues along behind him that even Ron could trip over.

"Yup," Wade said. "Wasn't sure I would at first. I couldn't track the carbon emissions from his hovercraft because he made it electric this time." He frowned. "Sneaky."

"And environmentally friendly," Kim pointed out with an eye-roll. It was _way _easier - in every sense of the word - to imagine Drakken having a brief attack of eco-guilt than actually realizing he needed to cover his tracks.

Wade rolled his eyes back, and Kim saw a grin starting in their sparkle. "Right. That too. But I finally nabbed him with - get this - a magazine subscription."

"Get. Out," Kim said. _Drakken, I underestimated your lameness potential, _she silently added. No need to worry he'd gotten any smarter in prison.

"The address is listed as somewhere in Lowerton Forest. I sent a drone out to comb the area, and it located a trapdoor hidden just about in the middle of the forest. It appears to lead to some sort of underground bunker. That's gotta be Drakken's hideout."

"Drakken's underground?" Kim said. She could hardly envision that fidgety little ferret of a man willingly camping out in one of those army-style bunkers without going even crazier. It was DEFINITELY all to Shego's credit that no one had nabbed them yet.

Wade nodded. "Yeah. And here's the weird part."

Kim grunted to herself. The whole _thing _was the weird part as far as she was concerned.

"I'm picking up heat signals from inside. But only two."

"Drakken and Shego," Kim said. Every hair on her arms jerked straight up like students that couldn't wait to be called on. "But not Athena? Are you sure your equipment isn't broken?"

Wade shot her as dirty a look as those cheeks could pull off.

"No. Okay. Sorry." Kim felt her knees start to tremble and clenched herself tight - backbone rigid against the benefits-of-exercise poster hung up behind her, feet clinging to the floor like a treefrog's, jaw prepared to chomp at the next person who bumped into her between classes. "So they've already taken her somewhere else. Any idea where?"

The helpless, creamy palms that Wade turned up looked _younger _than nine now. Kim suddenly wished she could have pressed them between both of hers, boy-sweat and all. "Not yet. I'm sorry. I wish I could tell you more."

"You're doing great, Wade," Kim assured him. "At least I know where to start. Drakken can tell me where Athena is." All she had to do was anticipate how melodramatic Drakken's gasp would be when she dropped into his new lair, and the words steadied themselves.

And she'd make sure Drakken would talk if she had to yank out fistfuls of his nightmare hairdo. Come to think of it, she probably _wouldn't _need to. The guy had a serious case of leaky-faucet-mouth.

"I'll keep scanning for her. Just in case." Wade paused over his keyboard. "And - Kim? Be careful."

Huh. He'd never felt the need to say THAT to her before.

"Absolutely. Promise. You rock." Kim pressed her lips together and spread them at Wade - not exactly a smile, but not that nibbled-corner nervousness either. Her finger didn't even shake on the button as she ended the call.

Nah, her thoughts were doing all the shaking _for _her. To be fair, the darkest ones only tumbled around for a sec before cartwheeling out again. Drakken wasn't _that _kind of psycho. He'd gotten a totally-minor cut on his arm when his island lair had erupted and immediately started hemorrhaging panic way quicker than he'd been losing blood. How such a wuss could see himself as a world-conquering supervillain, Kim had never figured out and she didn't expect to today.

Kim turned, straightened the poster she'd been leaning against, and then slammed out of the nurse's office. The senior girl, still pawing at her phone, sprang away as if Kim had jumped after her with a can of bear spray. If she'd been carrying any, she just might have. Her stinging chest was mad now, and she couldn't wait to unload its mess on Drakken and Shego.

But she still couldn't get her head around the fact that the two of them had made off with _Athena_. That wasn't just her Kimness talking, either. There was still something incredibly bizarre about Drakken targeting New Girl, no matter how talented she was. _She_ hadn't destroyed his best-loved lair. _She _hadn't put him in prison.

_Something's wrong._

The thought was like a cobweb Kim had walked into, and even taking the hallways at max speed didn't blow it off of her.

Once she was close enough to feel the draft from the now-scalped gym, Kim froze for a minute. Her backpack, with her mission outfit and all her gear stashed inside, was still in there. She absolutely needed to get it, but she didn't look forward to walking in again and every eye flipping to her - or maybe worse, glazing over her as if they couldn't quite place who she was. It beat jumping into another tank of electric eels, but not by much.

_Yikes, girlfriend. Step away from the pity party._

Kim slipped her eyes closed, and Dad's voice kicked on in her head. _Anything's possible for a Possible. _He'd said it to her on her first day of Pre-K. And again on the first day of elementary. And again on the first day of middle, which he called "junior high" - that was how adorably out-of-date he was. And just a month ago on her first day at Middleton High, before she'd shown up and encountered a teacher straight out of the armed forces and a food chain without her as the top link. She pictured his only-slightly-lined face with the new gray streaks peeping around it, said a silent thank-you to him, and took a step forward.

Before she could round the corner to the gym, though, the boys' bathroom door swung in and a dandelion-blond head popped out. It was attached to a lanky body swimming in black and khaki that wasted no time stumbling over its own feet - feet clad in matching-black, quiet-as-they-come padded sneakers.

Ron. Already in his mission outfit.

"Hey, KP!" he cried. "I've been looking for you! I mean, y'know, not in _there_, but before that." He swung a backpack that WASN'T falling apart or stained by Bueno Nacho grease forward. "I nabbed this for you."

Kim didn't have to tug the zipper to know her own ironed-and-folded-last-night mission turtleneck was resting on top of her student handbook and everything else she'd packed away for homework tonight. She let the thickness linger at the back of her throat for a second and then cleared her throat. "So - we're going to find Athena?"

"'Course we are," Ron said, leaning in close. Something deeper lounged under his usual happy-go-lucky vibe, but he still moved like a little boy who expected the world to be nice to him. "You're Kim Possible! Duh! You never give up on your friends!"

Now _him _\- Kim went ahead and gave him the world's biggest hug, right there in front of the water fountain. It wouldn't have done anything for her food-chain status, but for the first time all semester, Kim _so _didn't care.

**~Finally got this one ready for posting. This was definitely a scene I'd been looking forward to reworking. I'd wanted to depict Kim feeling the same feelings she did in the movie (because of _course_ she'd blame herself and get mega-stressed), while at the same time show her expressing those feelings in a way more like the Kim we all know and love from the cartoon. Hope I managed to pull it off. :) Love you guys!~  
**


	10. Confrontation

**~Okay, so this final* chapter got amazingly large. I've split it up into three smaller chapters to make it easier to digest, but I'm not going to torture anyone. The continuation will be up tomorrow unless something really weird happens in my life.**

***There is an epilogue, too.**

**Anyway, the climax here was the part of the story I was most excited to rewrite. Thanks for reading, and reviews are always appreciated!~**

Kim stared out the back window of her across-the-street neighbor's station wagon and steamed. She'd already felt a strong, protective case form around her, sort of like a peanut shell, her normal response to supervillains. At least her jaw had gotten more comfortable and her teeth weren't all jammed into each other anymore.

As the houses grew taller and skinnier and the spaces between them narrower, all Kim really saw was Drakken's creepy, scarred likeness closing in until she was near enough to see his victorious smile disappear as if it'd been flushed down the toilet. Actually, the idea of flushing the whole _man_ was way more appealing than anything involving toilets should have been.

Kim tapped her fingers against the window in a not-exactly-happy-but-content-enough-in-its-excitement rhythm. "Thank you _soooo _much for driving us all the way to Lowerton, Mrs. Ortega," she said.

"Oh, it's the least I can do." Mrs. Ortega twinkled a look at Kim in the rearview mirror. "You're the best baby-sitter I've ever had."

Okay, how pathetic was it that she lit up inside at the words "you're the best"?

From the front seat she'd insisted he ride in - his motion sickness was _not _a joke when they were on a mission - Ron reached back and squeezed Kim's hand. His lips were pulled into the little almost-white upturn they always developed when he was psyching himself up to save the world. Guilt snatched at Kim's stomach. She wished she'd been as good a friend to Athena as Ron was being to her.

Kim let the thought leave with the sigh she'd been holding back. _All right - so, as of NOW, we are officially in make-up-for-it time. Starting with this rescue._

When she returned her gaze to the window, she didn't see Drakken's face superimposed over everything rushing by anymore. Athena's had replaced it - a definite improvement, even wearing that _Kim-why-did-you-let-me-down? _expression. That would get swapped out for relief and gratitude anyway as soon as Kim untied her from whatever kitchen chair Drakken had her strapped to while he went on and on and _on _about his plan - his _ingenious_ and _dazzling _and _wondrous _plan. Drakken was never at a loss for adjectives, even if he had to resort to making up his own. Kim was pretty sure she'd heard him declare last year's plan to be "glorylicious."

The car slid to a careful stop alongside the far border of Lowerton Forest. Kim clicked off her seat belt and dove for the door, the handle weirdly cold between her fingers. Ron flailed himself out of the front seat and went to stand by her side, gulping his Adam's apple up and down. It was somehow comforting.

"Thanks again," Kim told Mrs. Ortega, and then she charged into the uneven rows of aspens and pines that threw their shadows across the stick-cluttered ground and nestled so closely together at the tops that they built a sort of ceiling. The whole effect served to plunge the forest into a permanent state of night. Needles rustled under Kim's shoes as she slowed her pace to a jog. Behind her, she heard Ron gulp again and knew he was probably expecting some horror-movie baddie to jump out from behind a thick trunk waving a chainsaw. She was more concerned about running into Shego.

Kim pressed the Kimmunicator to life again. "All right, Wade, we're in. You've got a lock on our coordinates?"

Wade shot them a thumb's-up.

"Spankin'," Kim said. "How far we need to go?"

Wade squinted away from the screen that floated in front of him and onto the one resting on his desk. "About fifty feet to the south."

Ron's forehead knotted. No surprise there. The compass in that poor kid's mind misbehaved as if it were constantly in the presence of a magnet.

Kim, for her part, located north at a quick glance and then hauled Ron in the opposite direction, focusing on placing her feet as stealth-gently as she could. Something flew, cawing, over their heads, and Kim heard Ron bite a scream off his tongue. He really had come a long way since they'd started their world-saving gigs two years ago.

She just hoped it was far enough.

Kim watched her own feet for the next ten minutes, right up to the point where she had to hurdle a fallen tree blocking the path. Yeah, it felt good to shift every piece of attention to what her body was doing. Ron hiked one lanky leg at a time over the tree, and once he was safe on the other side gave Kim probably the same grin his baby-self had given his 'rents after he'd taken his first wobbly steps.

_Her _next step paused in midair. In front of them and to the left, just a veer off the path, Kim spotted a massive tangle of brown, shriveled leaves - way _too _brown and shriveled for the not-quite-end of September. Not to mention they were maple leaves. She hadn't seen a single maple since they'd entered the forest.

EXACTLY the kind of work you would expect from a half-genius, half-dingbat.

Kim scattered the leaves closest to her with a soft kick. Peeks of wood showed through underneath, too neatly lined up to be a tipped-over tree. Another hand-ruffle through the leaves surrounding it revealed a giant ring that reminded her of the someone's-at-the-door clappers she knew from Dad's favorite movie-version of _A Christmas Carol_.

"I think we found them," Kim hissed to Ron. She folded her arms over her thumping-with-satisfaction chest. Ron was right beside her and Drakken and Shego were beneath her, and she couldn't have felt more at home if she'd been snuggled in her own bed under the orchid-colored comforter.

"Score!" Ron semi-whispered back. He dipped his head down to his baggy waistband and gave his pants pocket a stroke. "You hear that, Ruf? This is your chance to get back at those creeps who wrecked your first house!"

A sleepy growl came from the pocket, and Kim found herself blinking at it. "You brought the naked mole rat?" As if she _wasn't _glad for an excuse to roll her eyes.

"Sure! Why not? He's got a personal stake in this, too, and he could be, like, our mascot. Plus he's really strong for a little dude, and he's super-smart." Ron wiggled his fingers into his pocket, his face beaming. "I think he understands algebra better than I do."

_Who doesn't?_ Kim considered saying. But that need-to-be-a-better-friend mantra still tickled at her brain the way homework assignments did until she completed them. She grabbed the ring and with a tense of every cheerleading-toughened muscle she had, dragged it up until the trapdoor lay half-open like a yawn.

A less-than-pleasant aroma made a beeline for Kim's nostrils right away. Even before her eyes had adjusted to the almost total lack of light, she knew every surface of this place was going to be dripping mildew. And when they _did _adjust, Kim took in walls packed together like snap-in blocks and a low slab of a ceiling, dangling a couple of threadbare sheets from hooks at opposite ends of the room - one pulled shut and the other dangling lazily open to show a seen-better-days mattress.

Some achy sense of _and-they've-been-LIVING-here?_ wanted to sink into Kim. But it transformed into _How fitting - a scummy hideout for scummy people_ the second it hit the peanut shell, and Kim wasn't about to question the shell and the complete confidence she got from wearing it. Even a designer outfit couldn't compare to that.

Yeah, and as Kim shot down the stone steps, she could see Drakken's icky little fingerprints all over the dump. An entire wall blotted out by an enormous computer monitor. Buttons everywhere, most of the giant red _push-me-and-the-world-explodes _variety. Lumps of paper wadded on the dirt floor, obviously tossed there by someone's distinctly _un_impressive throwing arm.

Drakken himself stood at the base of the steps, his hands curled sideways on his hips, his face a study of stupid cockiness. Only the steel-cool I've-been-waiting-for-you glint in his eyes kept Kim from blurting laughter right into it. Instead, she forced it down to hers with a yank on his lab coat.

"Where's Athena, Drakken?" she said in a snarl she almost didn't recognize.

Drakken chuckled, a bubbly-fountain sound just an octave too low to be a giggle. "Why, she's right here!"

He grabbed an armless swivel chair that scrolled in wickedly on the sides and spun it around to face Kim. There was Athena, slouched partially off the chair, looking less like a hostage and more like a Tweeb who'd just broken _another _of Nana's antique vases. Shego hadn't carved claw marks into her, no noticeable bruises rose up from her skin, and Kim couldn't find so much as a tear in her clothes. Even the purple braid had survived, hanging limp against her cheek as she kept her perfectly-shadowed eyelids angled toward the floor.

Kim used an arm-sweep to get Drakken out of the way and ran to Athena's side. "Athena! Oh, thank goodness! I guess Wade's technology really _was _broken. Remind me to scold him for that, okay?"

Nothing.

"And what technology would that be?" Drakken said. His scar had adopted a nervous twitch in the two seconds Kim had looked away.

"Heat-sensing tech!" jumped out of Ron. "It was only picking up two people, so we thought you'd dumped Athena somewhere else!"

Okay, so Drakken wasn't the only faucet-mouthed person in the room, and Wade wasn't the only team member who needed scolding. Maybe Ron was trying to make up for Athena, who had yet to utter a word. It wouldn't have surprised Kim if she'd passed out from the smell.

Kim knelt beside her friend and gave Athena's shoulder a shake. "Athena? Are you all right? Did they hurt you?"

Athena finally lifted her head. She smiled at Kim - weakly - as if she had some motion sickness going on herself. "Hi, Kim," she said, her voice matching her smile in queasiness. "Welcome to the party."

That was the last thing Kim heard before Shego slammed into her from behind.

Kim's face punched the floor, which felt _way _too spongy to set her ears ringing the way it did. Shego settled her mostly-muscle weight on top of Kim, and even in the dark Kim could imagine the knife-slash smile she had to be wearing.

But it was Athena who took up most of Kim's available mind-space, everything on her wilted and miserable - and not the I've-just-been-kidnapped-by-two-freaks type of miserable. No, there was something in her wilt that went deeper than that, something Kim couldn't pinpoint. It stopped her from knowing the exact spot where she was supposed to thrust her elbow to catch Shego off guard. Instead, she dug _both _elbows into the dirt and tried to roll out from under Shego, spin her off of her.

Shego responded with a firm, I-could-make-you-bleed-if-I-wanted-to hold on Kim's throat, and it wasn't an idle threat. Kim remembered it from last summer - the heavy-duty metal blades that Shego kept inside the fingers of her gloves, how they'd dug into her skin as they fought for control of Drakken's stupid mind-control machine.

Well - crud. _Even MY parents probably aren't going to be cool with me coming home with claw marks on my throat._

An instant later, Kim heard a strangled hiss, the sound of someone choking off their own pain-cry before it could escape. The pressure on her back let up just enough for Kim to hike her shoulders up and twist free. Ron knelt beside them, clenching two fistfuls of Shego's hair.

Not that it kept Shego down for long. She whirled on Ron and cracked a left hook into his jaw that staggered him backward with several yelps that set fire to Kim's skin.

Instinct took over then. Swiveling toward Shego was easier than getting off the bus this morning had been, and Kim barely felt her own foot when it flashed forward and smashed Shego in the stomach. In the split-second that Shego bent at the waist, Kim cut her feet out from under her with a leg-sweep.

Shego growled from the floor, sounding more feline by the minute, and made a grab for Kim's ankle. Kim drove her heel straight into Shego's face. Kind of a jerk move, but what did anyone EXPECT after they'd clobbered her best friend?

Kim bolted to where Ron was leaning against a block-of-cement wall right next to some sort of alarm-security system that read "Robotics Lab" in fourth-grade penmanship that had to be Drakken's. The implications of that were going to have to wait for later. She shook Ron's sleeve. "Ron. Ron, are you okay?"

Ron shimmered a stupefied grin. "Yeah, I think so. There were too many of you for a sec, but now I just see one."

This kid was the best.

"Listen, Ron, you distract Drakken. I'll go get Athena."

Ron didn't launch into his usual why-do-_I_-have-to-be-the-distraction whine. Somebody else's life could be at stake here, and he knew it demanded nothing less than his A-game. The idea that he had out-matured her today pulled Kim's entire body up stiff like a puppet.

She was at Athena's side in an instant, snagging her by the chic collar. "Come on, Athena. Let's get you out of here." She could hear her voice snapping out commands, not hostile but not playing, like it always did when she took charge of a hostage sitch.

Athena squirmed in that little-kid-who-had-to-go-to-the-bathroom style. Her eyes wouldn't even graze Kim's.

The beginnings of fear drifted down over Kim, heavier and tighter-clinging and more obnoxious than Shego. "You're mad at me, aren't you, Athena?" she said. "Look, I totally don't blame you. _I'm _mad at me, too. I should have thrown you that pole. I have no idea where my mind was." She heard the words come rushing out of her from that hot, earnest place where tears went to die. "I'm so sorry. It's all my fault you were kidnapped."

Athena finally lifted her head and dragged it back and forth, staring at her as if Kim had tried to pair a string bikini with hiking boots. "No. It's one-hundred-percent my fault."

"What the HECK are you talking about?" Kim blurted out. A predator-presence slunk up behind her and didn't touch her. It was _so _the absolute scariest thing Shego could have done just then.

"Oh, this is genius!"

Kim recognized the boom and snapped her head around to see Drakken striding toward them from across the room. Even with his runty legs, it didn't take him long to reach them, and he man-giggled with every step. He stopped in front of Athena and extended an arm.

Athena stayed still. She looked ready to throw up at any given minute, and Kim didn't blame her. _Her _insides knotted into a fist, and _she _wasn't even the one Drakken approached.

"Don't you dare hurt her, Drakken!" Kim said, wincing as soon as the words had flown out of her. Sheesh, she sounded like a card-carrying member of the Cliche Supply Club, and she knew without even glancing over that Shego had probably just executed a flawless eye-roll.

_Drakken_'s expression was perfectly readable - and it made no sense. Like a "Caution - Wet Floor" sign dropped in the middle of the Sahara Desert. The grinning, gloating little creep was gone. He looked offended somehow, as if Kim had just accused him of something even _he _found hideous.

"Of course not!" Drakken replied. He took Athena's chin and tilted it upward, and Kim couldn't tear her eyes away any more than the first time they'd taken in _Jaws_. "I would never hurt my Athena."

_His _Athena.

It wasn't nausea that rolled through Kim. It was something way stronger as every suspicious piece ripped through her head and collected in a cruel knot at the back of her brain.

The electric eel footage all over the 'Net.

Athena never eating or drinking.

Never meeting Athena's parents or going over to her house.

The sign for the robotics lab.

Only two heat signatures detected in the bunker.

It hadn't been a glitch in Wade's equipment at all. Just a huge, nasty, and could-be-permanent glitch in the man who stood before her trying to recall how to smirk.

"Athena's a robot I created to infiltrate your crummy high school and crummy-fy your life!" Drakken called out unnecessarily, arms flinging, every bit as if he were on Broadway.

Kim's lips felt like pieces of wood as she moved them. "Like we didn't just figure that out, Drakken."

"I didn't," Ron piped up as he joined them in the corner. "But now that you mention it, it does make a lot of sense."

To him, maybe. Kim had never felt so lost in her life.

She took a step forward, feeling as if someone else was at the controls, moving her body for her. Someone whose heart WASN'T being batted around like a pinata. Someone strong with anger. Someone like Shego.


	11. Realization

"You. Liar." The heels of Kim's hands collided with Athena's chest before she even realized she had them lifted. Athena stumbled, and even though she didn't fall, her eyes cringed as if she suspected a dismantling was in her future.

_Kim _would be a liar if she didn't admit the thought tempted her.

"You stinkin' fraud. You were never looking for a friend. You were setting me up from the first second we met. No, before! I can't believe I trusted a _weapon_."

"Hey, now!" Drakken snarled from Athena's side. "Don't unload on her! It's just her programming."

The boom barely reached Kim. She had her fist pulled back again when she heard her Nana Bluetooth-clear in her head - _Is this really what you want to do, Kimberly Ann?_

No, it wasn't. She didn't want to hurt Athena. What she _wanted _was to repossess every speck of pain Athena had spent all semester wringing out of her. And there was no point in wasting her fury on a person who wasn't even a person.

Kim turned to Shego and threw out her fist, which Shego stopped with an open palm as if she'd been expecting it. Amusement played around her lips. "Careful there, Pumpkin," she said, the sarcasm oozing like the slime on the walls.

A fuse lit behind Kim's eyes.

She grabbed Shego's wrist and yanked it behind her back. Keeping it in her grip, Kim landed her other hand in the middle of Shego's spine and, before Shego could so much as growl again, Kim rushed her body forward like a battering ram, stopping only when Shego smashed into Drakken's junior-mad-scientist desk and overturned it. Her long legs batted at the air and a cyclone of papers scattered every which way across the dimness.

Kim stood there for a moment, panting, triumphant. Proud of herself. Disgusted with herself. She turned away from the mess Shego had made of the desk, not wanting to watch whatever came next. At this point, Kim wasn't totally sure which would be freakier - seeing Shego get back up or seeing her _not _get back up.

"KP!" Ron yelped. "A little help here!"

Kim snapped back into laser-pointer-focus to find Ron in a heap on the ground, bucking like Uncle Slim's robotic horse whenever anyone but Slim tried to ride him at the figure on top of him.

Make that _sort of _on top of him. Drakken was half standing, half toppling sideways across Ron, one hand clamped to the back of Ron's neck and the opposite knee attempting to plant itself on Ron's rear to keep him down. Drakken's fingers looked about as substantial as a pile of toothpicks, but it still _majorly _gorched Kim out to imagine how eerie-bony they must have felt curled just above Ron's too-wide collar.

"Ron!" Kim cried. If she'd thought her hackles had risen as high as they could go, she was wrong. She started to leap for him only to be halted by a grip like her mom's cast-iron skillet.

Kim turned just her eyes to see Athena holding on to Kim's wrist, her face as blank as a never-been-used pillowcase. She nodded toward Kim's other clenched fist. "If you hit me now, your hand will shatter." She softened to a whisper. "And I don't think either one of us wants that."

It wasn't the threat that held Kim back. It was the waver of sincerity in Athena's voice - as if somewhere along the way, the little robo-witch had learned how to churn out counterfeit concern.

Only from _who_? Kim had never known Drakken to NOT let his feelings bleed straight through his expressions, and Shego didn't strike her as the type who would care enough to fake it.

In the next second, Kim's arms were pinned to her chest and she was forced to watch Drakken barely-bigger-muscling Ron across his cruddy moss floor. Shego sauntered up behind them. _Cool. So I managed not to kill her._

Athena tugged Kim up against the nearest wall and punched a code into the black panel that hung there. The wall peeled back in rows and columns, revealing a lower-temperature room shadowed in blacks and grays and cold, confident blues. It smelled like a toolbox, all metal with hints of rubber. Probably supposed to intimidate her. Kim was actually just grateful to leave behind the mildew stench.

"A secret door?" Kim threw out a too-big gasp and tried to sneer at Drakken. "How _completely _predictable."

Drakken's chubby-for-a-thin-guy's cheeks puckered for a moment, but he recovered with a scoff Shego must have taught him. "It's clear you still don't appreciate true genius when you see it, Kim Possible."

"Oh, is that what I'm supposed to be seeing?" Kim asked, widening her eyes.

It landed on her target and stuck him to the floor, muttering. Shego transferred Ron from Drakken's arms to hers, neatly catching Ron's leg by crossing her knee over his before he could even think about kicking. Even now, Ron's freckle-faced scowl was the brightest thing in the entire place.

Kim wrenched to break free from the arm-cage Athena had her trapped in, but every time she moved Athena clamped it down tighter. Athena pulled her across the floor of what _had _to be Drakken's robotics lab and bumped her up three very-short steps onto a platform that reminded Kim of a cake topper. Shego deposited Ron beside Kim, and instantly she and Athena stepped backward as if they'd _both _been programmed. A glass canister shot up from the platform and its sides met each other at the ceiling, sealing Kim and Ron in.

Drakken preened his fingernails against the front of his so-last-decade lab coat while Shego and Athena stepped up to flank him like the Secret Service. The sight of all three of them together put needles in Kim's throat.

"Why are you doing this, Drakken?" Kim said - because it wasn't _quite_ as lame as a you'll-never-get-away-with-this, and because Drakken could always be trusted to talk. And talk and talk and talk. "Why go to all this trouble to ruin my life?"

Yikes. She was sounding a little wobbly there.

But Drakken sounded wobblier as he all but spit back at her, "Because you ruined _mine_, Kim Possible! You destroyed my dream for world domination! You burned my home to the ground!" The bags under Drakken's eyes had been dragged halfway down his face, leaving Kim wondering for a sec just how old this overgrown brat _was_, and he balled his tiny hands at his sides. "You got me thrown in prison! Solitary confinement! In the Arctic! For a _year_!"

There was no recovering this time. Drakken's whole body quaked on its own personal fault line. Kim remembered feeling sorry for the guy last year as he'd snarled at her from whatever place inside of him had broken, operating on first-grader logic, one minute looking like the type of guy you saved the world from and the next like someone you should have saved HIMSELF from. She felt it again now, under the rush of everything-mad to her cheeks and the ache in her leg to lash back at them.

Kim pressed her forehead against the glass. For a heartbeat, it jolted Kim back to the tank at the Upperton Biology Research Lab. Except there were no electric eels today - and no chance that Athena would help her escape. She was standing out there with the bad guys because she _was_ one.

"But I shall have the last laugh!" Drakken exclaimed. "And I will laugh - and laugh - and laugh - until I can't laugh no more." The last several words slid into some kind of tempo, and he snapped his fingers to keep up with it.

At his side, Athena ducked her head the way she had on the first day of school, only there was nothing for her to hide behind anymore.

"Hey, now, what's all this?" Drakken reached over, caught Athena's chin, and leveled it up. "The head-ducking programming was supposed to be defunct after phase one. Are you malfunctioning?"

A bit of dread-sweat formed on Kim's forehead as Athena mumbled, "No." Kim had no idea what Drakken would do with a malfunctioning robot, but as Athena flicked tortured eyes to Kim, Kim realized Athena was more afraid of _her _than of Drakken.

That should have made her feel better. Instead it wrapped another layer of sadness around the entire thing.

Drakken pumped his Adam's apple up and down like he was dunking a basketball. "And now we have arrived at the part where I hold you captive and explain my plan to you. I'm sure you've been very anxious to hear all about it."

In spite of the knot in her chest, Kim drummed up a smirk for him. "Sure. I'd rather be watching reruns of _Captain Constellation_."

Drakken brightened up as if she'd just offered him the keys to a candy shop - or a nuclear power plant. "You're a Constellationite, too?" he said.

Kim groaned out loud, but inside her heart pattered out relief. _You go, Drakken. Keep being stupid._ The longer he was, the thinner the glass between them seemed to grow. Kim could already envision a celebration-dinner at Bueno Nacho afterward with Ron and Rufus.

All of them trying not to look at the empty place where Athena had always sat and fiddled with her straw.

Kim twisted to face Shego instead. "He still doesn't pick up sarcasm, does he?"

Shego gave her head a mournful shake as if she completely commiserated.

"GGHH! NNGGH! LLLK!" Drakken sputtered.

Kim recognized _those _noises. It was Drakken buffering while he rummaged through his junk-drawer-of-a-brain for a solution to some obstacle he hadn't anticipated - because he anticipated none of them.

"The plan, dude?" Ron interrupted him.

"Ah, yes!" Drakken's spine yanked itself straight, and he gave her a sicko-version of the Tweebs' just-booby-trapped-your-alarm-clock smile. "I'm sure you shall be most impressed, Kim Possible!"

_Seriously, what's so hard about just calling me "Kim"?_

Kim resisted the urge to slump against the glass and bury her fingers in her ears. If Drakken WANTED to give her the blueprints to the exact plan she was trying to deconstruct, who was _she _to stop him?

But that sick smile? Yeah, that had to go.

"Let me guess. You built a robot who could do everything better with me and dropped her into Middleton High to ruin my life," Kim said. She focused on the spot in the room farthest away from Athena. Kim couldn't imagine what she'd see on her face now, and she _definitely _couldn't imagine it being anything she'd want to look at.

Drakken's shoulders crumbled toward each other. "I hate it when you do that," he grunted.

Kim smiled. "I know."

After a few more frustration-grunts, Drakken was able to smooth himself out and give his eyebrow a wannabe-sinister wiggle that might have worked if he had toned it down just a _notch_. As it was, the thing looked ready to fly off his forehead. "That was the plan _at first_," he admitted. "To let you see what the world looks like when you have no choice but to stand back and watch someone else win, over and over! After all, 'Second place is just the first loser.' Leonardo Da Vinci said that."

"He _so _did not," Kim murmured.

"_SO did not_," Drakken repeated in the nasty squeak kids on the playground used to use to make fun of Ron - right before they'd taken one of Kim's soccer cleats to the shin. He dropped back to his usual thunder-voice to add, "Crushing, though, isn't it?"

Not especially. In fact, Kim could feel some clouds lifting off her spirit as everything snapped into place. She'd come in second place to a _robot_. Not another teenage girl. A _machine _programmed to outdo her - programmed by a guy who, for all his idiotic bumbling and total lack of common sense, knew his way around a robotics lab.

"And then it dawned on me, in my unmatched genius brain, after we'd stolen the Biometric Power Converter and humiliated you, that we could do so much more with it." Drakken went back to shining his fingernails. "You probably don't even know what one is, do you? A Biometric Power Converter?"

"It's a small machine that can theoretically transfer one creature's innate abilities or powers to another creature of the user's choosing," Kim recited. Exactly the way Wade had rattled it off to her.

Drakken stared open-mouthed just long enough for the drool to start. Gross.

He shook himself, the not-quite-ponytail bristling at his neck. "You see," he said at last, "it occurred to me that Athena hadn't just taken away your spark, your natural charisma, your Kim-Possible-ness! She had _absorbed _it into herself."

It was Kim's turn to stare, into Drakken's face, searching for signs of a joke. If this was one, no way would she give him the satisfaction of guffawing. "You're serious?" she said.

"As a global pandemic, Kim Possible," Drakken said - honestly, what was _with _the full-name thing? "It was obvious from when I first met you that you have a certain - spark - about you -"

_Not really the way I imagined a guy telling me that._

"- but I could not figure out what it was, how to put my finger on it!" Drakken spread his fingers and glowered at them, as if he could shame them into growing. "But then it left you as Athena became better and better. And since matter cannot be created or destroyed - only change forms - I was left with the stunning conclusion that it must have transferred into Athena!"

"Drakken -" Kim began.

"And then I thought, well, if it could transfer from you to her, who's to say it couldn't also transfer from her to me? With a little help from the Biometric Power Converter, of course!"

"Drakken - "

"Shego, the big reveal! Lights, please!" Drakken cried with a gangly flourish that almost knocked him to his rear.

Shego waited in the dark for a few seconds and then snapped a switch on the wall that had opened for them. Instantly, silvery-blue light flooded over the room, glinting off metal on almost every surface coming to center on a spot against the back wall where the floor had been wedged up slightly from the ground. On either side of the wedge stood two glass tubes just about identical to the one trapping Kim and Ron, only with front panels that swung open like come-on-in doors. Smack between the tubes, some of kind of black metallic conductor's stand grew up from the floor and stopped halfway up the tubes to branch into a gnarled hold with an empty triangle in the middle.

The same shape as the Biometric Power Converter Shego had bolted with.

Kim kind of wanted to kick herself. Normally she would've had this place scoped out within thirty seconds of being forced in here. That whole _the-person-I-showed-up-to-save-turned-out-not-to-be-my-friend-OR-a-hostage_ thing must have knocked her off peak performance.

"You see, we have stolen the spark that makes Kim - Possible!" Drakken proclaimed. "And soon it shall be mine, instead!"

This. Was. Insane.

What was Drakken _thinking_? Or, check that, _was _he thinking? It wasn't like Kim had some magical amulet that enabled her to do everything better than average - or even a mutant gene like whatever had given Shego her plasma powers. There was nothing, no actual _thing_, for him to steal.

Ron slipped his hand into Kim's, and Kim felt a little stronger with his nervous sweat drowning the beginnings of hers. The fact that even _he _was bewildered into silence spoke volumes thicker than the Middleton phone book.

"Drakken!" Kim snapped at him.

Drakken froze with one foot up on the wedge and turned back to her. "Mmm, yes?"

"This is your plan? It makes no sense!"

"Yes! Thank you!" Shego threw her arms into the air, and her eyes met Kim's for a we-could've-been-friends moment.

Drakken swiveled on her, complete with another almost-topple, looking ridiculously wounded. "Whose side are you on, Shego?"

"The side that pays me, of course," Shego said with a smooth shrug. "But ya gotta admit, the science is a little abstract. Especially for a 'mad genius.'"

Her finger-quotes set Drakken grunting all over again.

_Okay. This is MORE than enough crazy for one day._

Kim reached behind her for her backpack and everything on her tensed when her hands met air. She knew before her eyes even started their search that she would see her backpack wagging from Athena's hands. It would have looked taunting if Athena hadn't been blinking so hard.

"Come, Athena!" Drakken called. His voice echoed, and Kim realized he had already stashed himself into one of the glass tubes. The other one yawned open.

Athena let the backpack meet the floor with a relieved-sounding thud and darted herself up to the other glass tube. One hand on its door, she turned around, looked at Kim, and swallowed. Hard. "Kim - I really am sorry," she said.

_Sorry?_

If Kim could have laughed without crying, she would have. Instead, she locked her eyes onto Athena's almond-brown ones and loaded on the pressure until Athena had to be the one to glance away first. Except for those eyes, she just was another one of Drakken's Doomsday devices.

_Who came over to my house. And tried on my clothes. Nothing TOO game-changing about that, right?_

Athena stepped into the second tube. Its front panel hissed shut behind her, and Kim felt its closing click in her stomach. Shego strode up to the platform, her hair swishing its perfect waves behind her, and slid the Biometric Power Converter into its little metal nest. Within seconds, a lipstick-red light beamed from its inside out, and the bendy-straw-like devices connecting the two tubes glowed to life.

Adrenaline pulled Kim's hand from Ron's, doubled her fists for her, drove her leg over and over into the side of _their _tube. She had so much mad flowing through her, and not the smooth, easy kind of mad that always came to visit when she was staring down a supervillain. This was a jagged, ridiculous type that honestly made her believe for a second that she could kick her way through Plexiglass.

And then wring Drakken's little blue neck, no matter how much she pitied him.

Ron's hand eased onto Kim's shoulder like a hot towel. "It's okay," he said in a Ron-attempt-at-a-whisper. "We've still got a friend on the outside."

The fact that part of Kim wanted to lean against that idea, let it comfort her, frightened her more than the madman across the room cooing about his own brilliance. She turned toward Ron and tried not to snap her next words. "In case you haven't noticed, Athena really isn't on our side anymore."

_And she never was_, she DIDN'T add.

"No, not Athena." Ron rapped on the glass, and Kim followed his gaze down to the pink squiggle on the floor, scratching its head with its front claws. "Rufus."

Kim threw her head back, and her eyes snagged on two red buttons that popped from the opposite wall, their roundness bordered by yellow zigzags. One read, "Release prisoners." The other? No label. She nodded at Ron, who nodded at Rufus, who to Kim's utter surprise, nodded back.

_Great. My life is in the paws of a nibbly-toothed rat._

At least it was something Drakken wouldn't see coming. Which meant this wasn't over yet. Not by a long shot. Kim had never seen another plan this primed to ruin _itself _before, and she knew from last year that Drakken didn't tend to have backup plans, unless you counted screaming himself hoarse.

Ron squatted down and began to deliver instructions. To the rat.

Hey, it made as much sense as anything ELSE about today.

Kim bent to shield Ron and did her best to distract Shego by slitting a challenge-glare her way. Shego punched her with her smile alone and then tapped her foot twice against the cement floor. It slid open and up grew a banana-shaped console - half video game controller, half rocket navigation panel, and one-hundred-percent geek. When Shego took a seat behind it, she made Kim think of a supermodel who somebody had talked into advertising Everlot Online.

All right, so Shego was going to be a challenge. But she was just the kind of challenge Kim had gotten herself psyched up for. She could almost feel her knee thrusting up to meet Shego's chest, and the anticipation had a huge hand in holding her together.

Even from where he stood near the far wall, Drakken's chatter came through loud and clear. "You had no idea, did you, Kim Possible? No idea that someone like Dr. Drakken could outwit you? Not even an inkling suspicion that there might be someone in the world better than you?"

Why, oh why, couldn't those tubes have been soundproof? Somewhere in all that crud, he might have had a point, and it made Kim feel sick.

Shego poked a finger at the console, and a holo-sheet of numbers and letters and symbols they hadn't gotten to yet in Algebra 1 floated in an airy film in front of her. The old _I-don't-understand-everything-in-the-room _sense got its jaws around Kim again as Shego's eyes flicked back and forth over the film-screen.

"What are you _doing_, Shego?" Drakken asked. The second syllable was a full decibel higher than the first, and Kim suddenly felt like she was watching some bizarre comedy opera.

Shego didn't glance his way. "Just double-checking your calculations."

"That won't be necessary." Drakken folded his arms behind his back, clearly trying to project extreme patience, but his face majorly trembled, the black bags folding up as if to protect his eyes. "I checked them this morning."

"Yeah, but you know how you are sometimes with your - "

"Shego!" The wounded pride set Drakken's thunderclap voice roaring louder than ever, and Ron flinched beside Kim. "Not in front of our _foes_," he growled.

Kim chomped down on the urge to laugh, before Shego breathed in hard and fast. It was a sound Kim had never heard from her before, not even when she'd forced Shego backward over the desk, and it threw a chill over everything in the room, including Shego's brag-spewing boss.

The mega-chin turned and jutted Shego's direction. "What _is _it?" Annoyance crackled in every word, until he saw what Kim saw - Shego staring blankly at whatever was projected across the film-screen. Without the snark lounging on it, her face looked small and bleach-pale.

"Shego?" Kim asked.

Shego's black mouth curled in pre-cuss style. All that came out of it, though, was, "Dr. D-ee. Ohhhh, you messed up. You messed up big-time." It was a really weird time to notice the little pink shape that scampered up behind her, but Kim did.

"What?" Drakken shot back. "Whatever do you mean?"

"Did you _ever _consider the side effects of this stupid little procedure? Or even, God forbid, do some research into it?"

"I don't. . ." Drakken trailed off, brow crimping. "What side effects?"

"Doc, this is gonna destroy Athena."

Shego said it the way Dad would say, "Dinner's going to be a little late tonight," but Kim could see her hands opening and closing in rapid-fire clenches, as if only the blades in her gloves kept her from knuckling the console.

Drakken's head shot up and his eyes grew enormous. He looked like a driver's-ed student who'd somehow managed to run down a pedestrian in the school parking lot. Horror oozed from him like the sweat that was sticking his spiky hair to his forehead.

"That's not true! That's not _possible_!" Drakken's fingers clenched around his temples. "We - the device was made to induce a safe transaction! Protect the test subject!"

Shego's lip went back farther. "It was made to protect _organic matter_. Synthetics was NOT on their plates."

Heat rushed up the back of Kim's neck - the kind of heat that would turn to pain only if it could keep up with her. And then another noise echoed through the lab, a noise like a gallon of paint being overturned, wet and weepy and gushing out of control.

Dr. Drakken, the man who'd engineered a plan to shred Kim's life to confetti, was crying.

At max volume - which, coming from Drakken, was enough to practically pierce through your skull. Especially when combined with Ron's turbo-gasp on the other side of her.

Kim cranked herself around in the tube, and her eyes found Athena's before she even knew she was searching for them. They'd swelled to twice their usual size, and the look in them pierced Kim worse than Drakken's sobbing. They looked bewildered. They looked terrified. They looked. . .

Human.

Drakken sank to his knees in the glass canister. "I'm so sorry, Athena!" he blubbered. He'd plastered his hands over his face, but his sob-words still spurted out. "Your sacrifice will never be forgotten! When they write the chronicles of how the great Dr. Drakken came to rule the world, they will include your name! I shall make sure of i-i-i-iiiittt. . ."

The guy's menace had peeled back like a sunburn and bared the raw, vulnerable skin of a broken little boy. It would have been touching if Kim hadn't been stuck in a cage.

If anything about Athena had ever been real - even if it had nothing to do with their so-called friendship, even if it was nothing _good _\- Kim couldn't just leave her there to be trashed.

Kim inhaled more sharply than Shego had and forced her eyes to roll. "_Or _I could stop this whole stupid plan, and nothing would have to happen to her."

Drakken didn't appear to hear her. His head now rested on his canister's floor, wagging back and forth as if he were trying to wipe his fingerprints off the thing.

"Nice try, Kimmy," Shego said, every bit as if Kim had just tried to finagle her way out of weekend chores. The shriek that came out of her seconds later - another very UN-Shego sound - could hardly have been more satisfying. "What in the - what is _on _me?"

Shego brought her hand down to swat at her ankle, but by then Rufus had already skidded to her hip, then her shoulder, and then the top of her head. The swirl of hair up there had to be as thick as a tumbling mat, which was exactly how Rufus used it - crouching down on all fours, pushing off with his back paws, and soaring through the air. While Shego hollered and tried to rearrange her 'do, Rufus sailed across the lab and landed belly-first on the left button.

The button without a label.

Kim knew even before alarms began to flare and emergency lights flickered on scarlet from every socket that it must have been a self-destruct mechanism. It was just that kind of day.


	12. Disintegration

**~Only the epilogue to go after this!~**

"Now look what you've dooooooonnnnnnneeee," Drakken said. Bawled.

Shego whirled on him in a way that would've done Mr. Barkin proud. "What the _heck_, Doc? You spend two months whining about your first lair blowing up and then give _this _one a self-DESTRUCT feature?"

"Seriously, Drakken," Kim said around a dry lump. "What's up with that?"

Whether or not Drakken had anything to say in his defense, Kim would never know. His sobbing chewed the words up and spit them back out in pieces.

She expected Ron to let out one of his end-of-the-world howls at that point, but he was peering over the top of Kim's head and nodding toward the pink squiggle flopped on the stone floor. "It's all right, buddy. Get back up and try again! You'll get it this time!" he said - and _then _he shuddered from cowlicked head to sneakered toe. Kim felt the freak-out energy come off him like static electricity.

This time, Kim could've sworn the mole rat saluted before it hopped onto Shego's shoulder again. Shego took another swing at it, and the thing responded by chomping down on her finger. Shego managed to scream with her lips shut - had to give her some credit for that - and gave her hand an as-frenzied-as-Shego-ever-got shake. Rufus flew off her and smashed into the button on the left, rodent-rear first.

The glass itself seemed to let out a relief-sigh as it slid back into the floor. Kim hopped over it before it had even gone all the way down, her feet snapping down the steps to match her heartbeat. Shego made another aimed-at-Rufus lunge, which gave Kim an opportunity to kick her square in the backside. Kind of a cheap move, but it worked.

Ron, for his part, virtually went into a duck-and-roll to protect the mole rat. Sheesh. They really _had _bonded already. How did that make sense?

Drakken continue to shriek and wail like some kind of punk-rock singer. Kim was tempted to smash an elbow through his canister and into his throat just to make him shut _up_. The clog in her own throat thinned as she swallowed down resolve.

_Yeah, Drakken, you've really done it this time, _Kim thought, fury trickling sweat down her forehead as he writhed on the floor of his glass tube. _To yourSELF._

The sweat didn't cool but the fury did, replaced by a sad something Kim knew she'd have to haul back out to look at later. Maybe it wasn't that it was hard to hate this snuffling man in the corner who had already lost no matter what happened from here. Maybe it was that it was way too _easy_ to sit right with the Kimness that relished a challenge.

"Drakken! Dr. Drakken!" Athena said - with no discernible results. Her jaw worked as if she was shifting her mental stick-shift to another gear, and then flapped open to call out, "Kim! Kim, help me!"

The hairs on Kim's arms went into a halfway-rise. That was just a _little _opportunistic. Huh. She'd always pegged Athena as the _I-would-die-before-begging_ type - and she'd been wrong. Turned out begging was just a notch above dying in Athena's world. Not that Kim could blame her. She'd have tried just about anything, too, if it meant she wouldn't just stop existing, especially in this room that smelled like metal, where you could practically inhale Drakken's leaking-out ego.

Calm pumped through Kim's chest right in time with what otherwise would have been panic. Nobody was getting killed on her watch. Not even a sentient robot.

Kim shot forward, reached into the tangle of metal, and latched on to the Biometric Power Converter. Its spiked sides prickled at her palms, but she was so beyond caring. She'd thrown her shoulders back and locked her limbs into her best come-on-come-_on_ tug when an equally-prickly hand came down on her wrist.

Kim stared up into an enraged, marble-pale face. She already had one leg lifted for a kick, but then Shego rammed her backward down a set of identically-tiny steps and it was all Kim could do to keep her balance, much less her dignity. Shego's eyes were boiling as she smacked Kim against the back wall. Adrenaline curled around her pain the way Ron had curled himself over Rufus.

"Sorry, Kimmy. No touchy," Shego said. The straight-off-the-cover-of-a-magazine waves didn't so much as tilt, but Kim heard Shego jerk her words back toward the machine that hummed with a WAY unethical piece of tech, not to mention two semi-people - people Kim didn't like but would always feel lost in her own skin if she didn't save.

"Why are you fighting me on this, Shego?" Kim said, dialing up a laser-glare. "If you let that thing do whatever it's supposed to do, Athena will. . . die!" Saying the word out loud felt like spewing a mouthful of burning coffee.

Shego barked a harsh noise. "And if you yank that thing out, _both _of them might die, and THEN where would we be?" Her cold, hard voice snapped in two like a bone breaking.

_Then you'd have lost everyone in the world you care about_. Kim didn't say it. She never would - wasn't planning on getting _herself _killed on her watch, either.

Kim bent her arms and drove the joints into Shego's chest, knocking her back a few valuable inches. Shego lifted both hands in front of her and flicked them to life like twin lighters. One hand headed straight for Kim's ribs, and Kim thrust her forearm down so Shego's own clinked off of it. She couldn't help picturing a pair of bulls locking horns.

"This is a really stupid plan," Kim said instead. It was the closest thing to safety she could produce right now.

"Uh, ya think?" Shego said, upper lip cocked. "He wasn't even gonna use the Biometric Power Converter until a few days ago. And then he was all, 'Shego, I've found a way to steal Kim Possible's spark!' Like, what? And no matter how much I told him that isn't how popularity works - does he listen? Nooo, of course not."

Kim gaped. Shego had switched from a professional bone-breaker to a disgusted barely-not-a-teen-anymore person so fast and so easily that Kim almost forgot to duck the next punch. It sailed over her head, and Kim felt its unearthly heat threatening to scald her bald.

Not that there was much room inside Kim to worry about the hairdo sitch. Her mind was streaming with images of Ron and Athena and even Drakken - the people she was _so _not letting down - and they were all the springboard she needed to push off from the floor and backflip over Shego's head. It was the exact move that had won Middleton Middle School's cheerleaders the blue ribbon at county finals.

"Uh, hello, everybody?" Ron hollered from the other side of the metal-stinking room. "I'm not seein' any 'Cancel Self-Destruct' buttons over here. Can you help a guy out?"

His voice cracked, and if Shego had been any closer Kim would have head-butted her just for making it do that. Poor Ron got MORE than his daily dose of humiliation during the school day.

"Kim! Kim, can you get me out?" Athena beat against the glass, and Kim caught her breath, remembering the cold water soaking her thighs and the sparky shapes flitting through it on their way to her. Her nightmare brought to life after she'd trusted the new kid with it.

_Yeah. Tanks, doesn't it, Athena?_

The bitterness got so thick Kim almost couldn't swallow it, but it wasn't in charge here. It never was on a mission. This was the only time she got to play by the rules she set for herself. And she'd be breaking all of them if she let a grudge get in the way of what she knew was right.

Not that that stamped the grudge out of existence. Not even _close_.

Kim curved to the side to avoid another plasma-bolt and discovered that she'd folded back around to the front of the whole whack set-up. Shego stood between her and the disgusting machine, the twin lighters at the ends of her arms flicked on. Kim could sense a difference in the chucks of plasma sent Kim's direction, in the pump of Shego's chest as she let them fly. Something worse than anger was steaming beneath the smooth-marble skin. It didn't make Shego sloppy - Kim figured that wasn't even an OPTION for someone like Shego - in fact, she'd turned into an instrument of force and precision and rage.

But rage could make anyone stupid for at least ten seconds. Athena's so-called kidnapping had hinged on that being true. Now Kim just had to make those ten seconds count.

She shoved past Shego and stopped on the top step, swinging one arm out and back as if she were rearing up to clock Shego in the jaw. Shego charged her at nightmare-speed, and one glowing fist leaped forward.

Kim took the punch. It would seriously smart later, she knew - was probably seriously smarting _now_, but all she could feel was the arm she'd tensed bending back, her hand brushing across the gnarled jumble of metal. At what was probably the ninth second, Kim closed her fingers around the Biometric Power Converter and yanked it down on her way to the floor. The same prickly spikes dug into her hands, only this time it was salt-scrub-comforting.

The machine made a noise like a game-show buzzer. A light started blaring even-more-obnoxiously from the empty space the Biometric Power Converter left behind. Both glass tubes let out hisses.

Shego didn't do the villain-meltdown thing the way Drakken did. She just stood there, her wiry body tight and tense, and muttered something under her breath. Kim couldn't catch _what _exactly, but the urge to go over and cover Ron's ears struck her.

But, honestly, when smoke came gusting at them in lungfuls almost dense enough to choke on, a few less-than-G-rated phrases ran through Kim's mind too.

Kim didn't open her mouth - if she did, she knew she'd scream. Behind that cloudy glass, odds were that either Drakken or Athena had just been vaporized, and she'd never come up against quite that brand of nasty before. She threw a look of concern to Shego, whose eyes actually widened out of their catty slits. The blow-darts coming out of them THIS time were angry-scared. Kim knew the feeling perfectly.

Shego batted Kim out of her way as if shooing a fly. There wasn't anything vindictive in her shove, which worried Kim a lot more than she would admit. Even over the alarms that screeched at them to get out _now_, Kim could make out Shego's boot soles clattering across stone, empty of the attitude that usually spilled over even into her walk. In a blink, the girl had reached the left tube and wrenched its glass front open.

A scrawny, less-than-towering figure tripped out and rolled down the steps to land at Kim's feet.

It took Kim a sec to register what she was looking at. A blue lab coat with a notice-me-please green button at its belted waist, a blue lab coat that swam over the boy inside it. A boy who couldn't have been older than nine or ten, his eyes melting fudge above a light smattering of freckles and a nose that she could only describe as dainty. His skin was the color of a pancake BEFORE it went on the griddle, not the shade that brought out her CPR instincts just looking at it, but she recognized the rumpled mussiness of the dark hair.

Drakken. Caught on the wrong side of a machine that had just blasted itself apart. Dropped back into awkwardness that rivaled Ron's.

Kim held back a snort. Seriously, he was lucky to be in one piece - puny as that piece may have been.

_Okay, so the man who fought so hard to destroy me is going to have to live through puberty all over again. Seems like a fitting punishment to me._

Drakken pushed himself upright, topping out at about two-thirds of Kim's own petite height. He stared, embarrassed little patches of moisture drying on his cheeks, down at his hands, which had always been small-for-a-guy-his-size and which were now about as substantial as a pair of dragonfly wings. "What's going on?" he said. "Why did the lair get huge?"

If what passed for the lair's ceiling hadn't dropped a clump that hit the floor and sprayed dirt in all directions, Kim would've hardly been able to choke back her laugh. As pa-thet-IC as ninety-five percent of things about Drakken were, he'd always had the movie-announcer voice working in his favor. Now the movie announcer had been replaced with a newborn mouse.

Shego's usually sharp face flattened as she took in the new Drakken, and her words came out deflated, too. "Oh. Okay. I guess this is a thing now."

Drakken teetered in place, spun in Shego's direction, seemed to forget about bawling his eyes swollen. His clothes had shrunk with him, but they still swam on him, and Kim could only hope and pray they would stay where they belonged. _That _would have helped this whole disaster not a bit. "Shego!" he squeaked. "Release Athena!"

The mouse was trying to give orders, and Kim couldn't even spare a smirk.

"You got it, Junior." Shego snapped a crisp-with-sarcasm salute and swiveled toward Athena's tube. The thick mane fell forward and blocked Athena from Kim's sight. And only her sight. Kim could tell by sound alone that Athena had stopped screaming by that point but her fists kept slamming the glass like a scared little girl's.

The anger that Kim almost always channeled into bun-kicking determination ran around on a loop in her head, not sure who to throw itself at. With how far down Drakken had spiraled into hysteria and Shego looking uncomfortable for the first time since Kim had met her, they didn't seem like the same people who had jeered in her face a half-hour ago and taken such disgustingly obvious delight in what they'd done to her life. And Athena was -

No. _So _not going there.

Fear sparked in Kim's brain, but it was that same fear that stuck her to the ground and wouldn't let her move. She could NOT leave until she'd successfully cleared this room - any more than she could will herself blonde. It was a part of her.

She turned to the one person in the room she knew she cared about and nudged him in his skinny ribs. "Ron, take Rufus and get out of here. I'll meet you outside," she hissed.

Ron shook his head. "No way, KP. I'm not backin' out on you." It was about four decibels too high to be brave, but as far as Kim was concerned it made it even more noble.

Shego held her arms out in hatchets in front of her and hacked away at the glass. Her movements were choppy - another first for Shego - before she snatched back her breath and with it her smooth-as-a-lacquered-nail poise. The deflated expression twisted into a mirror image of the one Bonnie Rockwaller wore whenever some poor new girl on the squad missed sticking the landing, and she pressed one glowing palm to the glass wall and held it there without a tremor in sight.

Mini-Drakken scrambled up the steps beside her and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "How long is this going to take?" he whined.

"Six minutes until self-destruct," an automated voice blared from the ceiling.

Shego cut herself off in mid-likely-cuss-word. "Longer than _that_. 'Course the freakin' thing's _stuck_." She grabbed Drakken by the top of his disheveled head and shouted into the melting-fudge eyes, "Look, Shorty, _you _programmed this mess. Can't you, you know, STOP it?"

Drakken brightened up like a flashlight even as he squirmed away from her. "Why, yes, of course, Shego! I have verbal override!"

He said it with the same genius-little-kid-confidence that Kim was used to hearing from Wade. It almost made her breathe a sigh of relief - _before _she understood exactly how bad it was that she could compare them.

"Computer, abort self-destruct protocol by order of Dr. Drakken!" the kid yelled.

The pause that followed was so hopeful it kicked at Kim's heart. And then the lights flashed again, and the computer droned exactly the words Kim knew it was going to say - "Voice code not recognized. Please try again."

Apparently the computer didn't take orders from mice, either.

_All right, so it _can _get worse._

"Oh, butterbiscuits!" Drakken snarled - as much as his baggy-sleeved ten-year-old self could snarl.

"_What_?" Shego turned the single syllable into an ice pick. Kim never would have thought she'd long for Shego's signature snark, but she would have given a hunk of her hair right now to hear, _Sheesh, where did you learn to swear, Doc - the Pillsbury School of Baking?_

"It responds to my voice," Drakken said, the voice in question chipping away into a nervous giggle. Kim got the feeling he was more afraid of Shego blowing _her _top than the lair blowing its, and she couldn't really blame him for it. "And this - isn't my voice anymore. Well, it still _is_, but -"

"Shut it up, Drakken!" Shego bit back at him. And then all traces of Bonnie, all traces of anyone who ever felt anything, disappeared. Her face had gone blank as the whiteboard before Barkin got his marker all over it. "All right. That's it." She swept the room with a glare that did everything but throw flames.

"Four minutes until self-destruct," the ceiling reported.

Kim had already reared back and was preparing to push Ron toward the door with force she usually reserved for two-hundred-pound hench-goons, when Shego snapped, "We gotta go." She grabbed Mini-Drakken by his upper arm, her blade-lengthened fingers almost meeting over his barely-a-bicep, and began to drag him down the steps.

"Wait. Huh?" Athena said.

It wasn't tears Kim heard. It was something bewildered and adrift, as if she'd woken up this morning to find her bed floating in Lake Wannaweep. Something that had had its claws in Kim for a whole month now.

In another time and place, Kim might have been petty enough to enjoy it, given what the little con artist had put her through. But right now, with the lair shuddering under the weight of its own near-collapse and all of her muscles stuck in limbo, she couldn't enjoy ANYthing about the sitch.

Drakken churned his runty legs to keep up with Shego as she marched into a shadowed-even-with-all-the-lights-on corner of the lair that Kim hadn't had a chance to look over yet. Squinting at it now, she could make out blurry, hulked-up shapes, one of which looked almost identical to the creepy computer on the other side of the lab, like two parentheses encasing the room. The other one had to be the hovercraft, judging by its squatty roundness and Shego's hurry to reach it.

"Three minutes until self-destruct," the ceiling updated them.

"Uh, Kim, that's not enough minutes for me," Ron said, his voice almost whistling.

He was drowned out by Drakken, who screeched, "No! Stop! But - Athena! She'll be -" The ground came apart beneath him, and he was left doing the splits over the crack. "Meep!"

"_We'll _be 'meep' if we don't get out of here," Shego retorted. She grabbed Drakken and hauled him over the split in the floor, slamming him up against the other computer in the process. His tiny body caved, a display that Kim could only register as a little kid getting hurt, and it flinched in her stomach.

"Drakken!" Athena called, pummeling the glass again. "Dr. Drakken!"

Neither one of them answered her in words, although Drakken did make one of those noises of his. It sounded like the mouse was begging for his life.

They'd cleared a path straight to Athena.

A spike of energy went down Kim's spine - by _far _the best thing she'd felt today. She took the pitiful steps at a run as natural to her as breathing and looked around for some stupid high-tech toy of Drakken's she could use to break the glass.

Drakken stretched his arm forward over the computer console and pawed around at buttons his fingers could barely reach. His muttering somehow managed to hold its own among the six different alarms screaming their warnings.

Athena didn't seem to notice Kim at her side. Her gaze was riveted on Drakken and Drakken alone. "_Dad_!" she hollered.

The drawstring around her heart yanked. Mega-hard.

Drakken punched down on one nubby button as if he were buzzing in on a game show. His eyes squinted, the skin underneath them bucking, and then he turned and fled to the hovercraft, audibly sobbing as he went. A hole opened in the ceiling.

Right before it sucked the hovercraft up through it and out of Kim's sight, she caught a glimpse of Drakken's pasty face. Without the blueness dyeing it and the scar mangling it, his skin was soft and light-freckled and clearly wouldn't encounter a zit for several more years.

Funny what you noticed when your world blasted out of control.

The hovercraft disappeared with a cry of "I'm so sorry, Athena!" from Drakken.

Part of her hated that she wasn't going to get to chase after them and bring them to justice. Another part wondered just how much of a threat they could even be, now that they'd lost all their tech and Drakken looked for all the world like a kid playing mad scientist for Halloween. The rest of her, though, was just glad to see them go so she could _finally _focus on saving everyone else's tails.

"It's okay, Athena," Kim said. She rested her knuckles against the glass, still steaming from Shego's plasma. "I'll get you out."

"Why?" Athena said.

Kim had _zero _time and _zero _replies. She scanned the lair until she spotted her backpack lying smashed on the floor where one of the villains - Drakken, probs - had let it fall during the escape. "Ron - I'm gonna need my backpack!"

The thing had smacked into her chest, butting out the drawstring, before Kim had even finished the sentence. How great _was _that kid?

By now, Drakken's computer had started spitting orange flecks stronger and brighter than the fear-sparks in Kim's brain. THOSE were spewing out at a speed they rarely reached. Good thing all her thoughts only consisted of cracking the glass, saving Athena, and getting all three of them - four, counting the mole rat - out of there with seconds to spare. Nothing flammable up there for them to catch on.

Kim stuck her arm in her backpack up to the elbow and came out holding the laser-in-the-lipstick-tube Wade had given her for her fourteenth birthday. Her grip, only mildly sweat-wet, held the thing exactly the way she'd seen the pros do it in spy movies as it traced a steady line across the glass. She was weirdly proud of the fact that the shaking inside her didn't flow out to her hands.

"Two minutes until self-destruct," the computer reminded them.

Kim's finger crunched on the button until she thought it would break.

"That thing isn't stronger or hotter than Shego's plasma," Kim heard Athena say - as if from the other end of a football field. How the words jumped straight into her ears and sizzled there was something Kim couldn't explain.

"What do you mean?" Kim said.

She regretted it immediately. It was the stupidest question she could have possibly asked, and not just because she already knew _exactly _what Athena meant. Because Kim would have rather watched them crown Athena homecoming queen than hear her answer that.

"You're not going to be able to get me out in time. The math. It doesn't add up, Kim." Athena's voice had gone school-hot-lunch-bland, but there was nothing mechanical about it.

About it or any other part of Athena. She shook her head, the purple braid swaying sadly from side to side, and her eyes snagged on Kim's, heavy and remorseful and accepting.

If Drakken hadn't already spilled the tea, Kim never would've known she was looking at a robot.

Kim shook her head so hard that her own hair hit her cheeks in angry smacks. "Yes, I can." Her own harder-than-the-glass voice surprised her, given the fuzzy state of her throat. "I'm Kim Possible. I can do anything."

A metallic creaking snapped Kim's attention around to the laboratory door. The posts that propped the doorway open in a limited-time-offer rattled nervously, and splinter-thin cracks erupted across their dingy-gray surfaces. Beyond them, Kim could see the decaying rest of the lair, and it seemed to be begging her to run to it, every bit as loudly as the Ron-whines she could hear even over the sound of everything else shaking apart.

But he wouldn't leave without her - which was one _more _reason why they needed to get Athena out ASAP.

"One minute to self-destruct," the ceiling announced.

Kim dug into her backpack again, and the grappling hook all but jumped into her hand. She backed down the shivering steps to give herself enough leeway and fired. There was no sweat to compromise her hold this time. Nah, by this point Kim was pretty sure her pores had frozen shut.

The hook scraped the side of the glass and left a crack no bigger than a quarter. What had Drakken and Shego used to BUILD these things?

"Kim," Athena said quietly. "You need to go."

Kim rushed forward to grab the hook and rewind the rope, waiting for Athena to go blurry in her vision, but the scene refused to become anything other than clear and sharp - just like the shot-with-a-stun-gun tingle in her chest. "No. We've still got a minute. Everything's going to be okay."

It wasn't the thought of losing the robot programmed to make her life miserable that chilled her skin, Kim realized. It was the thought of failing her. She wouldn't have been betraying Athena if she'd left her there to die - she'd have been betraying _herself. _

Another shot of the grappling hook dinged the crack another few quarters out.

Athena's flat, sad eyes warmed a little. "I appreciate it, Kim. Really, I do. But do you know what Drakken did before he left?"

"What?" Kim's fist had bunched itself up into a knot that matched the one in her stomach. Right down to the hurt.

"He turned off my pain sensors." Athena gave a soft smile, as if she _weren't _talking about her own demise. Her calm filled her tube just like smoke had filled Drakken's. Kim admired it and wanted to kick it in the gut at the same time. "It's time for you to leave."

"No!" Kim slammed her hand against the tube. She knew she sounded like a little kid who'd just been told Santa Claus didn't exist, but she had to salvage this. "I can't leave you!"

"Yes, you can," Athena said. "You're Kim Possible. You can do anything."

The brown human eyes slipped shut, and Athena pressed a hand to the glass on either side of her. A tsunami of air and static electricity whooshed out from the tube, too strong for even Kim to fight her way out of. It knocked her down the wedge-steps, away from Athena, and pile-drove her into Ron, through the doorway, across the lair that Kim could almost see disintegrating right in front of her, out through the trapdoor, and a good thirty yards away.

Away from what all three of them knew was coming next.

The lair exploded with a roar that even Drakken's laugh couldn't have prepared Kim for. In the span of thirty slowed-to-a-crawl seconds, she saw the trapdoor leap wildly into the air and then break apart, wood planks spitting in every direction.

Instinct plunged Kim to the ground and threw her arm on top of Ron to shield him until the earth stopped quaking underneath her. It seemed to go on for an hour short of forever, but Kim was okay with that. All too soon, it was going to stop, and she was going to have to stand up and face what had just happened.

The ground stopped shaking before Kim did. Yeah, definitely too short.

She peeled herself off of Ron and pushed to her feet. He rolled over onto his back, moaned, and struggled to a stand next to her.

Kim didn't move one clenched-up muscle, not even when a piece of debris-on-fire launched into the tree right above them and burned itself out on the rain-damp needles. She'd felt helpless about twice a day during her high school career - but _never _in her world-saving career. That was a battle Athena couldn't afford for Kim to lose.

A battle Athena _couldn't have afforded_ for Kim to lose.

That was when Kim's knees turned to applesauce, and she groped for the nearest tree trunk. Before she could get a grip on it, though, Ron grabbed her in a hug from behind. _He _was sweating up a stench, a strangely comforting bit of disgusting.

"You okay, KP?" Ron asked.

"Yeah," Kim said, even though the landing had scraped up her forearms and her elbows were throbbing and someone might as well have been pounding her temple with a hammer. She knew twigs and mud littered her hair, but that fell firmly into the SO-does-not-matter category. They could hardly make her feel any more polluted inside than she already did. Somehow she made herself turn around to size up the damage.

Scorched wood and melted metal bits had replaced grass and dead leaves for the length of those thirty yards. A hollow-looking hill was swelling up from the ground, as if the lair had been grabbed and flipped inside-out. Tufts of smoke had already thinned out on the breeze and now drifted away in true lazy, move-along-there's-nothing-to-see-here manner.

The back of Kim's neck went cold and slick, and the tears gathering also turned to ice chips and slipped out of Kim's reach.

From far away, Kim heard Ron say, "Rufus, how 'bout you, bud?" Some part of her _hoped _the little vermin was okay, but he hovered near the bottom of her priority list. She tore across the soppy forest floor before her legs could give up on her again, biting her lower lip until she tasted blood.

Even with the smoke fanning away, it was hard to find anything in the all-of-a-sudden night as everything Drakken had had left in the world - minus the hovercraft - burned to a crisp on the ground in front of Kim. Cottony flecks of what used to be his pitiful mattress bounced over bare dirt and caught on tree limbs. A raw wood beam sectioned Kim off from everything else, most of which had already passed over into unrecognizable territory, and she was grateful for the excuse not to have to take another step forward. She sank down to her ankles beside the beam.

The beam with the hand sticking out from underneath it.

Kim swallowed so she wouldn't call Athena's name. That could have only been an invitation to disappointment, she knew. But maybe there was something Kim could still do. She'd seen people recover from worse. She'd _saved _people from worse.

Shooting upright again, Kim bumped the beam with her hip until she felt it lift and bent down to grab the hand.

The hand came up to her. By itself.

Kim immediately let go, and the hand flopped to the ground like a dead bird, wires sagging from its wrists while sparks danced from their copper ends.

It wasn't gruesome, not the way _Jaws _had been gruesome, but Kim still had to clench her jaw tight to keep from throwing up. A few tears squeezed out that Kim slapped away with the backs of her hands. She had to go back to Ron, keep him from seeing this. The kid who passed out at the sight of a chimp at the zoo didn't need this kind of nightmare-fuel.

Shuddering all the way to her heart, Kim stood up and turned to go.

"Kim?" someone called from the rubble.

Kim nearly jumped out of her mission khakis. She knew that voice. It was supposed to be attached to the hand.

"Athena?" Kim let herself say it this time.

"Over here, Kim!"

Kim hurtled the beam at a speed that would've done the middle-school track-and-field coach proud and skidded on the flaming remains of Drakken's world. The hollow hill had bulged upward and then collapsed back onto itself to form a barely-there shelf where broken glass had spewed in a more-or-less-circle. Inside, like a napkin basket in the middle of a table, sat Athena's head.

The only thing that stopped Kim from ripping out one of her rarely-used screams was that the mouth was moving, and the open eyes were bright and alert as they flicked from Kim's face to the destruction around them. Athena was as close to alive as she'd been to begin with.

"Athena? Oh my _gosh_, Athena?" Kim said - just to make SURE. "You -"

"I made it, yeah." A smile limped across Athena's face. "My head did, at least."

Kim forced herself to _not _survey her surroundings - phony body parts probably floated all around her like in some cleaned-up-for-TV horror movie. "Yeah, but - what about your body? Don't you need that?"

"It'd come in handy." Kim could hear the shoulderless shrug in Athena's voice. "But all my programming is stored in my head. As long as it stays intact, I'm good."

Kim relaxed her limbs and breathed out pure relief.

"So, um, I know this is probably too much to ask, but -" A confused cricket peeped what sounded like a question nearby, and Athena peeped along with it. "Can you help me now, Kim?"

Everything inside Kim sprang into delighted anticipation. It shivered straight down to her core and pulsed out to the rest of her in _that's-what-I'M-talking-about _currents. For this amazing second, she could actually positively ID herself as Kim Possible.

And then her thoughts got stuck somewhere she couldn't prod them loose. _Hello - have I always been this "me-me-me-me-me" about everything?_

Drakken had certainly seemed to think so.

Kim tensed as she remembered the streamy-eyed Drakken-kid being pulled from the room, hair scuffed up in four directions, bewilderment across the little-boy face that fit him so much better than the ruthless mask he'd struggled to keep on every other time they'd met. If he had tried to don that mask _now_, it would have been about as effective as a Chihuahua's snarl. She couldn't get rid of the moment when Shego had dropped the "she'll-be-destroyed" bomb and Kim was sure she had seen Drakken's heart, the one he claimed not to have, skid to a stop.

Yeah, of all that combined kept her feelings from landing on the other side of hatred. It was hard to hate someone who looked that broken - especially when that someone also looked ten years old. He'd gone from baddy to baby so fast that Kim's mind was still putting the pieces together, and she could only imagine how freaked _Drakken _was. The piece of Kim that shot her to Ron's side whenever some bully was hassling him in the halls, that charged her into burning buildings and followed her wherever she went, locked down like a cramped leg.

Because there had been nothing she could've done to help Drakken - and maybe there never would be.

It wasn't Dad's everything's-possible-for-a-Possible reassurance Kim heard in her head now, though. It was Nana, whispering, _Do what you can, where you are, with what you have._

"Kim?" Athena asked in the same timid tone Kim recognized from the first day of school. It had tricked her once. But for it to still be a trick NOW would mean that old faucet-mouthed Drakken had kept something to himself, and Kim didn't figure him for the type to be able to hold onto a secret - at least not when the opportunity to gloat presented itself.

Kim crouched again. "Of course I'll help you, Athena."

_Hey, it's what I do._

She reached down and tucked Athena's head under her arm - sheesh, they were DEEP into films-I-never-should-have-watched territory here - and walked away with it, fighting with every single part of herself to pretend it was a cantaloupe. The fire faded into background disaster as Kim picked her way to a tree decently away from the smoldering lair and a cartwheel's distance from Ron. Two low branches crossed over each other like legs forming a lap, and Kim rested Athena's head in their crook.

Athena flicked a glance up at Kim with the surreal eyes that only added to the overall massively-disturbing vibe. "Thank you, Kim!"

"Oh, please. _So _not the drama." Kim flicked a hand and tried to laugh it away.

"No, girlfriend, that was _definite _drama. And I. . . I'm so sorry. For everything I did. For the way I made you feel. My -" Athena's lips worked in a way that screamed _I'd be swallowing if I still had a neck_. "Drakken and Shego were totally wrong about you."

Kim blinked her way into understanding what she'd just heard. Along the way, she also tried to picture Drakken or Shego ever saying they were sorry or they'd been wrong. She could _maaaaybe _see Drakken apologizing if she scooted in close and squinted, but never admitting to his mess-ups. As for Shego - Kim might as well have tried picturing her cheerfully greeting Smarty Mart shoppers from behind a check-out counter.

"TBH, Athena," Kim said right out loud, "I think you might be more human than either of them."

Athena frowned. "I don't think that's completely fair."

_They ran off and left you to be blown to confetti! _Kim wanted to say. And didn't. If _she_ could pity Drakken after all the crud he'd put her through, she could only imagine how complicated things must have felt for Athena. They'd been the closest things she had to family.

_And to think, five hours ago, I wanted to steal her life._

Kim took another grateful breath and released it with a call of, "Hey, Ron! I'm over here!"

"Kim!" Ron hollered from five trees away. "Are you still okay?"

"Spankin'. But before you come over here, I've got to ask you - where do severed robot heads fall on the Ron Freak-Out Meter?"

Even in the darkness, Kim was sure Ron's eyebrows had huddled together in thought. "Um, let's see. Probably somewhere between cockroaches and garden gnomes. Maybe on the same scale as ventriloquist dummies." Pause. "Wait - just how hypothetical is this question?"

"It's not. Not at all," Kim said. "So - just prepare yourself."

Ron was at her side in her a few strides, Rufus sticking to his shoulder like gum on the bottom of someone's shoe. He startled when he spotted Athena's disembodied face, his own going the color of a cloud, but he managed to give what was left of her a wave. "Hey, Athena. How are you?" he squeaked.

"I've been better," Athena said. The humor was so obviously churning to keep itself afloat that Kim's chest tightened. It was time to do what Shego had taunted her to do back in the research lab fight, which _so _didn't feel like it had happened less than forty-eight hours ago.

Time to call her dad.

Kim pawed around in her backpack until she found her phone and tapped at the buttons until Dad's face appeared on the droning screen. Thirty seconds later, the other end clicked into clarity.

"Kimmy! Is everything all right?" Dad asked. Kim could hear some kind of whirling gizmo in the background along with a timer beeping for attention, but his voice made her top priority. Honestly, she didn't think Dad's brain ever fully left Earth's orbit while she was out on a mission.

Right now, with a robot's head resting in a tree's lap while the unattached rest-of-her burned behind them, Kim didn't even find it that embarrassing.

"Everything's fine, Dad. Drakken escaped, but we stopped him." _From doing whatEVER the heck he thought he was going to do, _she also didn't add. Not with Athena in earshot. "The problem is, his lair blew sky-high. And Ron and I are fine, but - there was a robot in his lab."

Dad didn't miss a beat. "Sentient?"

"Yup."

"That _madman_." Dad cracked the word like a piece of beef jerky. Kim hoped Athena didn't catch _that_, either. "I'm sorry you had to see that -"

"Her head's okay, though, Dad. She just kind of needs a new body right now. Will you help her?"

Dad chuckle-sighed, the way he'd done in every memory Kim had of him, reaching right back to her Pull-Up days. "You have a beautiful heart, Kimmy. I'll be right there, and we'll see what we can do."

Okay, so he was the best. Nerdiness and all.

"Right there" took twenty minutes that felt like forty-five. Finally Wade reported from her wrist that the Possibles' old station wagon had just been spotted parking outside the Lowerton Forest. It wasn't too much longer afterward that Kim picked up the hush of her dad's soft loafers making their way across twigs and spun around to greet him.

Dad's held-straight, chopping-at-the-air arms turned into a hug as soon as Kim was within reach, wrapping her in his special mix of aftershave and morning coffee and gentleness for a too-short-to-blush-over time. Over his sturdy shoulder, Kim saw Athena lower her eyelashes - the ones Kim had envied back when they first met. For someone who'd been made immune to pain, she sure looked like she was fighting off an attack of it.

"Well then. Where's the patient?" Dad said as he let Kim go.

"Over here." Kim took a step forward and motioned to the tree. Behind her, Ron was still pale around the freckles but didn't seem to be on the verge of collapse anymore. Weird how that was a comfort in itself.

Athena let her gaze flicker up to Dad's face. "Hi. I'm Athena."

Dad's eyes did their wandering-off-to-some-other-galaxy thing as he knelt beside the tree. "Fascinating."

"This is my dad. My dad the _rocket scientist_, remember? He can totally rebuild you," Kim said, trying to convince herself that was something she reassured her classmates of every day. Sure, Dad had brought plenty of weird gadgets home from the space center, even a few robots with more-or-less-human designs, but none of THOSE had ever achieved Athena's freaky realism.

Drakken must have been several levels ahead of Dad and his crew in robot-building. It left her strangely unsettled.

"Yeah? And then what?" Athena said, all quiet and quivery. "Where am I going to _live_? Who would _want _me?"

Kim ran her tongue down the inside of her cheek. Fair questions. She'd already discarded the Possible house as an option. It'd be beyond awk-weird to share her home with something that Drakken had created. And even if Athena was more of a _someone _than a _something_, the thought of Drakken's handiwork sitting across the dinner table from her, not eating a thing, creeped Kim out way more than she would care to admit.

But she could let those details ride off on the breeze with the smoke. Save people first. Figure out the deets later. It was the Possible way.

Kim folded her arms and felt herself break into the most genuine smile she'd smiled all semester. "We'll figure it out, Athena. We'll figure it _all _out. Like I said - everything's going to be just fine."

Only this time, she wasn't lying.


	13. Epilogue

_Status report 2.0._

_Rebooting. . . _

I open my eyes to a house that was once enemy territory. To a harsh kitchen light that my eyes absorb without harm and the leftover smell of a family's dinner. To Kim Possible's face hovering near mine, concern pinching her forehead, and the support of her dad's hands, so much stronger than my father's.

The room sways around me and then falls into focus.

"Athena?" Kim says. "Do you know where you are?"

"Your house," I reply. I sound the same - Mr. Possible has crafted a voicebox roughly the same size and shape as my old one.

"And how do you feel?" Kim says.

Her question deserves consideration. I feel hard metallic joints settle into mesh sockets, their angles even sharper and more precise; I feel the rod of my backbone align to keep me balanced on the thin cot on the Possibles' kitchen floor; I feel the jolt of electric currents up my arms, down my legs, through my chest. I feel so much after being reduced to a head, disconnected from the rest of the world, nothing more than a paperweight. "I feel. . . alive," I say simply.

Mr. Possible strokes my braid back from my face. His hands are gentle but, I decide now, too large. I want them to be skinny and clumsy and nervous. I turn my face away.

Kim's bare feet stare back at me, her dirt-crusted, soot-streaked shoes resting on gleaming tile beneath the table. I wonder how long it has been since she came back for me when she had no reason to come back, when she would have been completely blameless had she let the flames take me. The girl was right when she called me a weapon. I was created to ruin her life, but I still had to throw her out of the lair before she could lay it down for mine.

Even now, a hint of bitterness curls her posture before she shifts her weight, and I see that she means me no harm. That she has been trying to do right all along. My apologies have been accepted but not processed.

My circuitry whirs and strains as if to reboot all over again.

I do not know that kind of goodness. But I want to learn.

The idle spaces in my mind quickly fill with images of Drakken fleeing the lair before it could collapse, tears streaming down a cheek now marked by boyish freckles rather than a winding scar. At the beginning of the memory, Shego drags him across the floor while he struggles against her, but by the end, he turns around and sobs his way out of the lair, stumbling over feet even tinier than before.

Malice has shaped my life, formed the ceiling and floor of my world. I know what it looks like when one person wants to destroy another person. I even know what it looks like when one person is willing to let another person be destroyed for the sake of something they consider more important. Neither of those were what I saw in my father's eyes as he ran.

But he still left me behind.

My pain must show, because Kim reaches over and touches my arm. "It's okay, Athena," she says. "You're safe now."

I glance down at my body, which feels new and different, my skin untouched, the bending of my limbs fresh and yet to be tested. I know she is trying to help me feel better, and I know she speaks the truth. Unlike me, Kim Possible doesn't lie.

So, yes, I am safe. But there is something else I need to be, too, and I am not yet. My creators still wander around somewhere and wear their wounds on the inside, their hatred twisting their love for me, for themselves.

"Thanks to you." I drag up a smile for Kim; it is more exerting than summoning the energy to throw her to safety. "I just. . . don't know where to go from here."

Kim rolls in her lips. "Where do you _want _to go from here?"

This question stuns me. My desires have always been dictated by my programming. I have no idea what I, Athena Smith, created by Dr. Drakken, actually want.

Except I do.

"I want to stay," I say. "I want the life I pretended to have, only I want it to be real. I want to go to school and come with you to Bueno Nacho even though I can't eat and just - be a teenage girl."

Kim nods, a quick snap of her head, as though the matter has already been resolved. "Then we'll try to find a place where you can do that."

She does not offer to let me stay here, and I do not ask her. I could never live in this house. Drakken's envy paints its walls and carpets its stairs, filling its every lovely nook and cranny. It would never be home.

Mr. Possible frowns. "Not a lot of people you can trust with a sentient robot, Kimmy-Cub. Heck, I wouldn't even trust some of my colleagues at the Space Center. Dr. Fen, for example -"

"Wait a minute!" Kim stands up, cutting her dad off. "What about Wade? He'd _love _to have you for a friend. I think he gets lonely sometimes, holed up in his room all day helping save everyone. And he's totally trustworthy," she adds, widening her eyes significantly at Mr. Possible.

He strokes his jaw in thought. "Wade. Yes. Extremely intelligent young man. Good head on his shoulders. Very honorable. You know what - I think we can make that work."

Kim disappears into the living room, her fingers already busy with the communication device on her wrist, and her father is right behind her. I sit up, swing my legs over the side of the cot, and try not to relive the moment when the lair blew up, night air and flame and debris replacing the walls, replacing my _body_. The footage of Drakken and Shego escaping repeats in my head, frame by frame, and I frantically search their turned-away backs for some clue as to how it felt to leave me. The heels of my hands press against my cheekbones, hard, and despite my internal GPS I am lost inside.

Slightly less so when Kim and her father pile me into the back of their car and drive me the few miles to the house where I am to stay. Wade, a chubby, bean-shaped child, greets me with a surprisingly shy voice and awe in eyes that are somehow both knowledgeable and naive. I have to force myself not to compare them to my father's.

My father, who is now a helpless child. My father, who left me behind in the doomed lair, his eyes apologizing to me every step of the way.

I am not sure how I feel about him.

"I hope I'm not too much trouble," I say to Wade. There is nothing else for me to say.

"Are you _kidding_?" Wade replies. "A robot sibling is, like, the coolest thing that has ever happened to me!"

My head grows heavy and needs to hang, as if my neck has turned to putty. "I don't know how to be a sibling," I confess. "Or a friend. Or a good guy."

"We'll teach you," Wade says without a pause.

"Yeah, and don't forget, you already saved my life." Kim tilts her head to the side, her hair dropping like a red curtain, signaling the close of something. "I'd label that a PGS - Pretty Good Start."

Light kicks on in my reward center. I am surprised, but only for a moment. I was programmed to respond to kindness with loyalty, and is that really so different from humans? Because I believe with my every component that Drakken has the same programming. There have just been so few in his life to be kind to him.

Wade's mother appears formidable but her face bears the same kindness that her son's does. She helps me sit down on a tall, spindly stool and asks me if I want milk and cookies, nods as if in understanding when I tell her I can't digest, and soon hurries off to prepare the guest room that will become mine.

A routine begins to develop after that.

I live with Wade and his parents - mostly his mom, because his dad spends most of his time at work. Wade monitors me every day, analyzing my programming, posing questions and scribbling my responses down on pads of paper. In anyone else's hands, I would feel like a chore, a homework assignment, but Wade handles me with consideration and warmth, quick to suggest games of chess, quicker still to give me a hug when the lair explodes around me again at random intervals.

Mr. Possible stops by every few days to observe me and listen to Wade report his findings. I do not like the tightness around his mouth when he talks about my father, but otherwise he is a good man. Still, I prefer Wade's company to his.

After taking two weeks off to recover and reboot, I go back to Middleton High. Kim stands me in front of the entire freshman student body in the courtyard one day and announces to them all that I am an AI - an artificial intelligence - who will be attending classes as part of a major project on personhood, that I am to be treated like any other student but with maybe a touch more patience.

"Did you build her?" a boy shouts from the audience.

My teeth catch on my lips.

Kim shakes her head. "No, I didn't. But the guy who built her. . . he couldn't take care of her anymore. So he gave her to me."

I turn and stare into her eyes. They are open and honest as ever. No lies. She must really believe what she is saying. It eases the heaviness that sometimes grabs hold of my body.

In math class, as Ron takes attendance, he lets a note land face-down on my desk. I open it to read, _KP wants to know if you still want to go on missions with us? Be a member of Team Possible?_

I don't allow myself to consider whether or not Kim still sees me as a weapon, one now under her control. One day I will ask her about it, but not today. Today I just accept their offer when we meet at our lunch table.

I still love Dr. Drakken and, I decide, I always will. But I can't let him hurt people anymore.

That very afternoon, after the ring of the final bell, I quit the cheer squad. "Don't get me wrong," I tell Bonnie as she glares at me through narrowed slits, disdain a thin cover for fear. "I love the squad. But I can wait until next year to try out. Like all the other freshmen."

Kim grins at me, and my reward center chimes like a cash register.

I begin to see the darkness in my father's heart, how deeply it reached. It horrifies me, though maybe not as much as it should. At night, when I have nested like a bird into a layer of sheets and blankets, my head struggles with its freedom to wag around, and my rootless feet search for the stasis chamber, its containing clamps. I don't wake the family at those times. I close my eyes, and it is the memory of Drakken dropping a kiss between my eyebrows that comforts me.

Evil has made itself at home inside him, but it is not his soul's only occupant. Somewhere he remembers what it is to be decent, to be affectionate, even to be selfless. He is part of a problem greater than himself, a problem that has not yet scavenged every part of him; a trace of innocence takes shelter wherever it can find it, trying to outrun his darkness. I want that part of him, that trace, to win.

I suppose we will have to wait and see what happens.

"I hate Kim Possible. I hate Kim Possible! I _hate_ Kim Possible!"

Dr. Drakken spun to pace the length of the abandoned warehouse's floor for at _least _the fifty-ninth time, his footfalls landing angrily with all the strength he had left in his diminished body. The worn, raw wood walls didn't even have the decency to echo them back to him, underscoring his sense of fragility.

Shego looked up from her emery board. She'd been going after her nails with a vengeance - Drakken would have felt sorry for them if he could have felt anything besides rage pounding his eardrums from the inside. "Wait, help me out here," she said. "_How _do you feel about Kimmy?"

The sarcasm was as thick and rich as grape juice. _Sour _grape juice, Drakken thought darkly. He treated her to a glare - admittedly, perhaps, not his strongest. "Shego, I believe you know full well what my feelings toward Kim Possible are!" he shouted. Shrieked.

"I do." Shego's lips twitched, impish. "I just wanted an excuse to hear that cute little hamster voice one more time."

All at once, that same sour grape juice coated Drakken's throat. For a moment he was afraid he would cry, one of the nastier side effects of being transformed into a nine-year-old - along with the voice that apparently made people think of fuzzy little mammals. He dialed the glare up by twenty-five percent and, _gosh_, he hated having to look _up _at her!

If Professor Dementor could see how far he'd fallen - all the way down to four feet. . .

The thought chilled Drakken more than the October wind that blew through the broken windows. He wrapped both arms around his now-wispy frame and shuddered furiously. Electricity was this makeshift lair's one and only amenity. Even water came from a rusty pump behind the building. If they needed a bathroom for - ahem - other things, they'd probably have to head for the nearest convenience store.

And they were here because, once again, Kim Possible had destroyed his lair. His beautiful, beautiful lair -

No, he was lying to himself. That lair had been an ugly, rank-smelling lair, and he was glad to be rid of it. But it should have been _his _to ditch for something better, not _hers _to blow up.

_She takes away all my things! _leaped across Drakken's mind. It was immediately followed by a prickle somewhere inside, as if he'd fallen down somewhere and scraped his heart. Guilt, he supposed. Wasn't very familiar with the feeling.

Because Athena was not a "thing." She was a living person. A living person with clockwork viscera, true, but no one with their eyes in forward could deny she was indeed a person.

Or at least she _used _to be.

_"Dad!"_

Athena's final cry ricocheted in his head, leaving everything sore and miserable. Drakken considered plugging his ears, but he knew it wouldn't help. Athena, his Athena, was gone, buried in the rubble of his former lair just as if she'd never been. Who would win the honor of being Freshman of the Month now?

The answer came to him so quickly and easily that Drakken almost gagged on it.

"I _hate _her!" Drakken proclaimed again. The words seemed flimsy once they hit the open air, and he had to back them by driving his fist into the wall. Dislodged slivers poked him even through his gloves. It hurt, but the knowledge that he was harming something else helped him.

"Noted," Shego said dryly. "So - what's the plan now, Shorty?"

Drakken turned and began to pace again, faster now, ever faster. Staying still enveloped him with the feeling that he was about to be gobbled up by invisible monsters. It sounded ludicrous even for the child he currently was, but something about this new lair rubbed him the wrong way. It was wider and more spacious and certainly easier on the nose than the underground bunker had been, but once again the darkness hovering over it was unfamiliar to him. He hadn't tamed it, and it wouldn't necessarily be loyal to him. Drakken wondered how he'd be able to fall asleep tonight, even though all of his blinks ached to be longer.

"I _had _a plan," Drakken said, and to his horror his disadvantage of a voice grew thinner still. "And it was foolproof."

Shego's lips had grown twitchy again. "Obviously not."

"Yes, it _was_!" Drakken gripped his hair in two bewildered hands, hands that didn't know where anything belonged anymore. "I was going to steal her spark!"

"Yeah, see, I never understood that."

Of course she didn't - the ignorant masses never did. Drakken refrained from saying this to her. He didn't need Shego's plasma on top of everything else.

"It was _going _to work!" he tried instead.

"At a price."

Shego's sharpness jerked Drakken's head toward her, despite how much he disliked the view from down here. Her jaw could've met a steel blade and won, he thought.

Drakken would have squeezed his eyes shut but for the fact that he knew Athena would be waiting on the inside, her face panicked, her arm stretched out to him. Was there something he could have done differently? Did Shego drag him out, or did he follow of his own free will? He didn't know; the entire scene was so foggy, he might as well have been viewing it through steamed-up spectacles. And if he'd turned off her pain sensors, did that absolve him?

He had no idea.

Drakken sighed and bent at the waist again. Speculating served no point. He cared nothing for ethics. He only cared about Athena. For all the good that had done him - or her - or anyone.

"I miss her too," Drakken confessed. His knees magnetized, bowing into one another. "I will always, always miss her. But she would have blown up no matter what we did. It's Kim Possible's fault, not ours!" The words were cold and dead, frostbite, and they were true. They had to be true, or he himself would self-destruct.

Shego's blank expression tightened, and she tilted the emery board down to reach her littlest nail. "So - are we going to just sit around here hating her, or are we going to take some action? 'Cause I'm getting bored."

"Take action, of course!" Drakken reassured her. "Dr. Drakken is a man of action!"

The twitches multiplied. "'Man' might be stretching it a bit right now."

Oooh, she was fighting _dirty_.

_Don't look at her, _Drakken commanded his eyes, and they obeyed better than anyone else he'd ever tried to boss around. But looking at himself was even worse. His beloved lab coat had shrunk somewhat with the rest of him, but not enough, not nearly enough. It could only stay on one shoulder at a time, and as of now, the right sleeve was sagging almost to his torso, displaying a scrawny, dough-colored arm. Drakken growled through pre-braces teeth that clamped crookedly and yanked it back to his shoulder, where it simply fell again.

"Yeah, speaking of which - " Shego was apparently not done with him - "I might need to go steal you a change of clothes pretty soon. What, size eight slim?"

Indignity heaped on top of indignity, into a pile so heavy that Drakken had to roar, "_Enough_, Shego!" Except he mewled like a lion cub instead.

Drakken jerked his gaze back down to his bare arm. Exposed and vulnerable, just waiting to be snickered at. He dropped his hands deep into his pockets, surprised when he heard something crinkle beneath his fingers.

So something had survived of his plan, after all! Hope crackled in his chest as he pulled whatever it was free.

A glossy photo of Middleton High stared up at Drakken from within the skinny margins of the brochure. Straight, neat letters announced, _Last week for belated enrollment!_ The sight of it started churning Drakken immediately, first his stomach and then - much more pleasantly - his brain.

High school. More effective a weapon against Kim Possible than any laser or annihilation ray or heat-seeking missile could have ever been. In one month, he had brought her to the edge. One more shove, and she would fall smack off her pedestal, if not off a cliff straight into nothingness.

Even a shove from a little boy with all the upper-body strength of a used matchstick. . .

_That's it. That's it!_ Drakken crumpled the brochure in delighted fists.

"Shego, I'm going to need a toupee!" he said.

"Um, no, honey," Shego said without even moving her gaze from her nail file. "That's about the only crisis you're NOT gonna have in your midlife."

Curses. He'd used the wrong word again. Although he would admit to being somewhat flattered. . .

"Not a toupee - not a piece - a wig! A full wig!" Drakken corrected himself. "As a dis-_guise_!" He let the last syllable waggle in the air, let his words taunt her for once.

Shego did not appear taunted. "Wait - what are we doing?"

"I'm going to go undercover! As a student at Kim Possible's school!" Drakken declared. He shook out the brochure and tried to hold it steady in front of Shego's eyes. "I'll take up the torch - destroy her life from the inside!"

A pinprick of light had appeared on the edge of his mental horizon, where the sun would eventually come up and the only darkness would be the kind that submitted to his authority.

"You. Are going to high school?" Shego snatched the brochure, folded it, and tapped it against his scalp, between the hair-spikes. "You're a little. . . little for it."

Drakken shoved his arms across his tingling chest. "That matters not! I'll. . . I'll tell them I skipped, like, five grades! Because I'm a child prodigy!"

Shego coughed. Hard, as if a piece of broccoli had been sucked down her windpipe.

Drakken looked at her sideways. "Did you choke on something?"

"Yeah. Something a little hard to swallow."

Hmmm. Drakken got the odd sensation that she was trying to poke at him with an insult, but it didn't work. Having a plan again had coated him in Teflon, so to speak, and it was going to take something more potent than _that _to pierce through.

"There's minimal effort required on your part, Shego," he said with a wave of his hand. "You just drop me off in the mornings, and I'll take care of the rest."

"Drop you _off_?"

"Yes." Drakken gave her his most charming smile, for once happy he was wearing a kid's harmless face. "You'll be my mother."

"Um. No. Absolutely not," Shego said.

"What? Why not?"

"Drakken." Shego pointed the nail file at him, as well as the nails on her opposite hand. "You're nine. I'm twenty-two. Do the math."

Drakken did the math. It wasn't pretty.

"Oh," he said.

"Yeah." Shego rolled her eyes. "Make me your cool big sister, or I'm out."

The stipulation jarred him, reminded him of the monetary basis of their relationship - something that had been easy to forget when they were united in their glee at watching Kim Possible squirm. Shego couldn't leave. He could do this, absolutely he could, but he couldn't do it alone. Not after everything that had happened.

"Cool big sister it is, then," Drakken said immediately - had to hustle this plan along before clouds of doubt could catch up to it. He tipped his head back and reached for his maniacal laugh.

And got a high-pitched giggle instead.

_Blast _it! He'd been so consumed by his own brilliance that he hadn't considered whether or not preadolescent vocal cords were compatible with villainous laughter. Obviously the answer was "not."

Shego had broken into some pretty serious giggling of her own, though hers had a cold sound, like ice cubes clicking off each other. "Oh my gosh, such a scary boy. I think every preschooler in Middleton just ran for their mommies."

Blood rushed to Drakken's fists, to his cheeks, leaving little in his wobbly legs. "Just remember that this 'scary boy' pays your salary!" The threat felt good bursting out of him, a decongestant to his clogged-up spirit.

"Are paychecks still valid if they're written in crayon?" Shego smirked down at him. He'd never realized just how _tall _she was before, just how firm her arms got when folded, their muscles lurking - sneaky, just like the rest of her. It brought on only the briefest ankle-quiver, disengaged before anyone could notice it.

Thank goodness. There was no more room left for fear. Even if the world _had _become literally larger and more frightening since he first stepped into the test tube and waited to be electrified with Kim Possible's power, no one would catch him running away and hiding like a coward anymore.

Drakken glanced down at the brochure, viciously satisfied to see the permanent crease marks he'd put there. Resolve beat behind his eyes.

_I'll do it. For Athena._

Drew Lipsky, Middleton High's newest enrolled student, shoved his glasses up and readjusted his blond wig as he gazed out the window of the used car Shego had hotwired last night at the school building. And it_ definitely _looked bigger than he remembered it.

That only stood to reason. Even as a freshman, he'd never been _this _small, his feet swinging several inches above the car's carpet - or would that just be the _car_pet?

Drakken threw a glance over at his cool big sister who sat drumming her nails, formidable even without their glove-blades, against the steering wheel. It jarred Drakken every time he saw her dressed in her new getup, a shirt the color of mint ice cream that glimmered as if someone were shining a flashlight on it and a pair of faded-denim shorts that stopped a bit too far above the knee for his taste. But it was essential to her cover, he reminded himself. Her hair was sleeked back into a ponytail as flowy-silky as a real's horse tail - nothing like the straggly one he missed so much - and two earrings rested in each lobe.

It all made her look terribly young. Which she _was_, of course - Drakken had always known that. But knowing it and being confronted with it like a weapon were two vastly different things. It had struck him when he'd first looked at her that morning that he was looking at a life interrupted, at the person she probably would have turned into if something hadn't knocked her into a world where she answered supervillains' ads. He wanted to know what that something was, but then, he also wanted to know what caused Uranus and its moons to revolve sideways. Some things even science might never know.

(Of course, Uranus's orbit had never made his heart hurt before.)

Shego must have felt his gaze and turned to stare back at him. Her eyebrows spiked as if to say, _What ARE you waiting for?_ Drakken rolled his eyes. Her stealth and smarts and knack for cruelty made her a talented villain-in-the-making, but she had yet to learn the art of dramatics.

Drakken hitched his backpack onto his shoulder with the sophistication of a lil' cowpoke and turned around for one more glance at Shego's face, searching for - what? He didn't know. Something he recognized from his pre-abandoned-warehouse days, maybe. Instead, every available inch of surface area was crawling with impatience.

"Thanks for dropping me off, Sheg - Shelia," Drakken quickly corrected himself. For the first time, he wondered if that was her real name; for the first time it occurred to him that "Shego" probably _wasn't_.

"Get out of here, you little turd," she said, waving her hand at him.

Good thing he hadn't insisted on her playing his mother. She'd never have pulled it off.

For a moment, Drakken thought of his _true _mother, with her dyed-rosy hair shaped like a mass of clouds piling up for a thunderstorm, her translucent glasses and the ink-drop eyes behind them. She would have been so disappointed if she knew he'd been arrested. Even more disappointed that he'd been transformed back into the nine-year-old she had always treated him like anyway. She was probably already hopping mad that he hadn't called or written in over a year.

Well, _duh_, as the teens would have said. It was one thing to mail a toilet-paper letter to Shego, but he would never have subjected his mother's soft, noble, cucumber-melon-scented hands to holding such a crude thing.

He wished he could have been stronger for her. For Athena. Most of all, for himself.

Drakken let the car door slam behind him, sucked in a breath that whistled, and took several huge, slow steps toward Middleton High - and gee-whiz, did _that _feel terrific or what? He was like Neal Armstrong on the moon, complete with the lowered gravity, which Drakken supposed could be chalked up to the fact that he'd lost an actual hundred pounds to the space-time continuum. He stopped before the set of double doors, still streaked with cleaner from a janitor's halfhearted effort, and gathered up a snicker that he delivered pitch-perfectly. Couldn't really do the evil chortling anymore, so nasty snickering had become his best option.

With two hard smacks of his hand, the door swung open and spat Drakken into the teeming hallway. The wall struck his elbow in a place where no wall should ever strike an elbow. Pain zinged up his arm in a thousand hot little needles. He had barely managed to peel himself off when the crowd spun as if it were being stirred with a mixer, and he was thrust into the blur of bodies.

And _then _gravity came back with a vengeance.

There were people. People all around him, people on every side, people so close their clothes brushed his. And not just people. Not just normal, adult people. _Teens_. Teens with attitudes and harsh tongues, with hormones he could practically _smell _from here.

For a moment, a sense of utter aloneness swiped at Drakken - which was absurd, considering the state of the hall, kids packed together so tightly they might as well have been bubble-wrapped. This was the farthest from isolation he had been in years, but the presences didn't register as human beings at all. Drakken saw himself on a golf course, alone in a sea of green, and every other body was just a sand trap, not someone who could offer companionship.

That _would _account for Duff Killigan's perpetual foul mood.

One boy's foot tangled up with Drakken's. The kid, who had to have cleared six feet tall, swore and shook his foot until it came loose. Drakken backed away from him, eyeballing him with what he sincerely hoped looked nothing like terror. Right in front of him, the boy seemed to turn into Carl Thompson, Drew Lipsky's personal tormentor - a short tidy haircut that no mother would be embarrassed by, tanned cheeks, arms muscled from gym class and kickball and later football. Arms made to inflict pain.

Drakken wrenched himself away from the Carl look-alike and slapped against the row of lockers on the farthest wall. He clung to the combination locks like lifelines, his palms awash in their own sweat, and fixed his eyes ahead of him on the room he recognized as Kim Possible's first-period study hall. Drakken had watched Athena travel down this hallway so many times, and he'd never given her enough credit for her deft maneuvering.

He'd never given her enough credit for anything.

The spark of anger - yes, that was what he needed! - burned in Drakken's lungs, and he was almost surprised that his mouth didn't transform into a flamethrower when he exhaled again. Something else, though, something heavier weighed on his scrawny shoulders as if he were giving a very fat toddler a piggyback ride. All right, he was four steps away from the door that would be his shelter. Now three steps. He took another one forward, and it was like trudging through waist-high pudding. Two steps. One step.

_Safe._

By that time, Drakken''s glasses had sweated off the end of his nose, and he had to nudge them back into place. He'd hated forfeiting his contacts, but Shego had insisted that these would provide better camouflage for his face, convince Kim Possible that he was the geeky, harmless little boy he pretended to be. Right now, he'd cultivated that image so successfully, he had a hard time not convincing _himself_.

And then, suddenly, out of the blue that no longer clung to his skin, there she was, the object of his wrath herself, however unimpressive that wrath may have seemed from the outside. She stood in the doorway, her backpack leaning at an indecisive angle, half on and half off, her books in the crook of her arm, as if both of their respective lives hadn't blown sky-high only two weeks ago. Without even glancing his way, Kim Possible continued chatting with a girl whose blond hair wasn't so much wavy as wrinkled, like a giant potato chip, and the ubiquitous buffoonish boy whose name Drakken could never recall. He supposed he would be hearing a lot more of it now. Maybe this time it would stick.

Drakken focused hard on his feet as he stomped past Kim Possible and her band of friends. He knew he wouldn't be able to look her in the face without sticking out his tongue or spitting or some other mouth-related thing that would blow his cover prematurely.

It bruised his pride to have to slink into a desk in the last row, but that, too, was necessary. Experience had taught him Kim Possible was a front-row student, and Drakken needed a barricade between himself and her. Even the thought of staring at the back of her perfection for an entire class period threatened to resurrect the TV dinner he'd had last night.

Private Tutor stood in front of his desk and, with a beady look, warned them all of the impending bell-ring. One of his fists could have wrapped around Drakken's throat. Easily.

Drakken gulped and tugged his backpack's zippers apart, laying his composition book flat on the desk. One hand still in his backpack, he rooted around for his pencil. His pencil. Where _was _his pencil?

Nowhere, that was where.

Great. He'd packed every practical joke guaranteed to mortify a teenage girl - whoopee cushions, pepper gum, the real can with the fake snake inside - but he'd forgotten to bring a _pencil_. Private Tutor would have his head on a platter. Or, more likely, display it on the wall next to the blackboard as a message for any student who even thought about messing up.

The first honest bits of fear made a grab for Drakken's stomach and sent him wheezing. He could sense the panic about to bloom like a mold culture, and he couldn't let it. As much as he hated to do it, Drakken forced himself to do the normal teenage-slacker thing, to lean forward and tap the dark-haired girl in front of him on the shoulder. "Hey," he whispered, "can I borrow a pencil?"

She turned around, and Drakken completely lost track of whether or not gravity was working at all.

Wide, walnut-brown eyes stared back at him, her pretty forehead wrinkled. Concern pinched her eyebrows together - gently, so gently. Her purple mini-braid swung against her cheek. A cheek he'd created.

She stuck something in his hand. Some tiny wooden stick. With what appeared to be graphite at the top. Did he ask her for one of those? Drakken wondered wildly. Did he need one of those?

No idea. He only knew that he gasped out loud before he could stop himself.

"Athena?"

END OF BOOK ONE

**~I'm sorrrry. XD But, yes, I'm planning to continue the storyline in correspondence with wherever the film series goes from here. Thanks to everyone who read! It means the world to me. :)~**


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